With his dreams dominated by bawdy thoughts of that nerdy girl in his class and nuns skilled in the use of garden sheers, Jeremy Capello (Robert Sean Leonard) seems like your typical all-American teenage boy, one with the usual share of pubescent idiosyncrasies. Obvious religious anxiety aside, it the butterflies-in-the-stomach school-hour fondness he visits on his classmate Darla Blake (Cheryl Pollak), a girl that he iterates “she's not every guy's cup of tea, but to me she's the world” that drew me into the story. Whatever happened in the movie, I knew that I would hold out until the moment these two hooked up. Capello is a mock-up of those communally inept 80's protagonists we’ve seen in countless films, most notably in “Last American Virgin”, "Weird Science" and “Fright Night” and you can’t help but like him. Gawking at Darla leaves him out in the cold, especially when a passed note from his redheaded dream girl advises, in no uncertain terms, "Stop staring at me, creep!”

Love will have to wait, as Jeremy’s pizza delivery job has suddenly opened up other possibilities, namely a late night rendezvous with a certain brown haired vixen, one that is searing hot for his bod… or that’s the gist. Jeremy is disinclined to accept her invitation (you know, cause Darla gives him the butterflies) but his horn dog friend Ralph (Evan Mirand) will have none of it, even offering to drive him up there and wait outside while he does his business with the anonymous raven-haired floozy. Ralph is the kind of guy John Belushi would have played; a vulgar, sex deprived jerk who practically drools when a woman walks in his direction because he’s sizing her up with his mattress. It’s interesting that the producers would chose to make him the POV centerpiece of the film’s title, especially considering how un-interesting he is. The fact that he loves his friend seems to be his only admirable quality.

With the possibility of getting laid just too good to pass up, Jeremy relents and with Ralph chauffeuring, heads off to swap bodily fluids with Ms. Whatshername up at her creepy looking pad. Things don’t go as planned, beginning when two blokes bust in on them just as Jeremy is getting lucky. Bearing giant crucifixes and wooden stakes, these weirdos send Jeremy scrambling for the sanctity of Ralph’s car. The next day holds a number of surprises, including the realization that his sudden flu like symptoms might have something do with those fresh bite marks on his neck, the fact that the girl for whom he spent time with the night before is now char-broil, along with the rest of her house, and, oh yeah, he is now being tailed by two separate groups of people, one of which he thinks is the cops, the other, the jealous boyfriend/husband of said char-broiled girl.

Jeremy still has Darla, or at least he stills wants Darla. Thankfully, fate will intervene, driving these two souls together inside a small freezer, as Jeremy attempts to outwit the interminable police officer-government agent hot on his tail. The freezer might be cold but Darla is warming to Jeremy, whose foibles and obvious adoration, she finds somewhat endearing. Inching closer to his own transformation, one that works on several distinct levels, a pubescent allegory, a spiritual awakening and a grim supernatural odyssey, Jeremy finds himself uncharacteristically perusing the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning looking to satisfy his sudden odd cravings. He thinks he might be protein deficient but that barely begins to explain why he wants to drink the blood from the thawed steak in the fridge. An unexpected meeting with his cop pursuer opens doors into another reality, one that he had easily dismissed but had become suspicious of due to his own odd behaviour. The guy is actually a two hundred year old vampire mentor known as Modoc and he has been sent to advise young Jeremy through his transition, even offering him a sort of ‘Vampirism for Dummies’ tutorial, which he impels him to read. The other two guys, the ones Jeremy encountered on that fateful night, and who have began staking out his friend Ralph for varying reasons, are vampire-hunters hell-bent on wiping out the blood-sucker legacy.

Jeremy hurdles the various stages of his awakening into vampirism -- denial, acceptance, embrace -- which are strangely similar to a drug dependents stages, in a matter of minutes, eventually arriving at a place where he is comfortable enough in himself to try to understand and harness his new found other-worldly powers, all while leaving room for an unsatisfactory conclusion. Modoc squares him up with the reality of his situation, that a couple of bad apples in the dark ages spoiled it for all the other vampires, who have co-existed peacefully with humans ever since -- their cravings satisfied by late night dashes to the local butcher shop for pig’s blood, conveniently run by a cadre of, what else, vampires. In fact pig’s blood is such a popular drink amongst the denizens of the walking dead and undead alike, that they’ve taken to packaging it up like Coke or Pepsi. Jeremy’s monumental change is first revealed to Ralph who takes the news by hiding in his room, wearing an over-sized scarf and constructing makeshift crucifixes, that is until Jeremy assures him that he won’t be killing him anytime soon. He's got that best friend thing going for him, remember. Darla, the only girl who seems impervious to Jeremy’s newfound Jedi mind control techniques, is the second to know, during a sloppy rush-to-the-finish all-too-happy climax that betrays the splendour of the film that came before it. On the outs are his parents who half-heartedly begin to suspect that their son is gay, leading one to wonder if, to the producers of this film, being gay is worse than being a vampire?

I sense that 80’s nostalgia will play a part in the film’s appeal. I remember this film from my youth, vaguely. Fitting it into the endless spew of other films of this type, “Teen Wolf”, “Teen Vamp”, "Teen Witch", “Fright Night” and “Lost Boys”, this film, for some reason, didn’t fare well. Not sure why? This is a sweet little piece of innocuous fun that features some charming characters in some outrageous only-in-the-movies situations. This is more of a boy-into-man coming of age comedy than a vampire film and it works well enough if you keep that in mind. The compact ending, which features numerous absurd instances where characters are guided by the quirks of the plot rather than anything burgeoning on sense, is too tidy for my liking. I would have been much happier had the ending excised all allusions to action, instead choosing to focus on the more human side. Interesting, this attempt at an action-packed finale nearly taints the best thing the film had going for it, the subtle and tricky love story between Jeremy and Darla.

Robert Sean Leonard as Jeremy Capello is one of those actors born for these kind of unassuming self-effacing character roles. Leonard, who has come into his own as a TV actor co-starring on the hit show House, is good looking and affable enough to get the audience behind him from frame one. Cheryl Pollak, playing Darla Blake, entered my consciousness with the highly underrated “Pump Up the Volume” playing the disturbed popular rich girl. It didn’t work for me. Here, though, Pollak wears her gawky character with much more aplomb. With her chopped off mane, her nerdy John Lennon glasses, and her ever-present saxophone (she’s a music prodigy or something), her nasal-sounding squeaky voice, she’s absolutely endearing. This isn’t the typical busty, blonde haired perfect dream girl we’ve come to anticipate from films of this ilk; this one feels is much more real. She’s not exactly popular and she’s not even the best looking girl in his cast (some of the other girls/extras in his class are more attractive) but Darla does it for Jeremy, and we get it. And we root for them all the way.

Modoc as played by Rene Auberjonois of Deep Space Nine fame, is enjoyable as the mentor. He feels like a more laid back Mr. Miyagi, only with a much friendlier manner. David Warner plays Professor Leopold McCarthy, an ill-fitting throwback in look to the old Hammer vampire hunters, and he represents the biggest problem I had with the film. His character and that of his sidekick Grimsdyke (Paul Wilson) appear only when the plot needs them and they offer absolutely nothing to the story – minus providing a face of intolerance. See, Modoc describes vampires as a ‘minority’ suggesting that like every other minority, they are struggling to achieve acceptance, and, like every other minority, they are not strangers to intolerance. Blacks had the Klan. Vampires have the Hunters. Had the producers attempted to give little Leo McCarthy (Joe McCarthy anyone?) a reason for his relentless slaughter of vampires, something more believable than the old generational hand-me down, I would have enjoyed his character more. Had say, a bad vampire killed his wife or something along those lines, I would have at least a tangible motive for his enduring endeavour. In the end, he feels as shoddy and lacking as his eventual fate that befalls him at the hands of a group of female vampires – in a graveyard, no less.

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