Red Snow review – vampire comedy spreads Christmas cheer not chills

Home Alone meets The Lost Boys in this trashy half-way entertaining Christmas vampire movie from director Sean Nichols Lynch; it’s a black comedy with some silly splattery gore. Lynch makes the most of a limited budget and his self-aware script is sometimes genuinely funny, too. Still, you wouldn’t exactly call it light of touch and the actors struggle a bit with the comic register. Some scenes leave you wondering: is this intentionally naff or just a bit wooden?

The setting is Lake Tahoe a couple of nights before Christmas. Dennice Cisneros plays Olivia, an unpublished author of romantic vampire novels who lives alone; her kitchen drawer is stuffed full of rejection letters. Any jobbing writer will sympathise with Olivia’s decision-making when she rescues a bat that turns out to be an actual vampire – a hot vampire at that. He is Luke (Nico Bellamy), and Olivia makes him an offer: he can crash for a few nights in her garage while he recovers from a nasty wooden-stake injury in return for reading her latest manuscript. So, while she warms up mugs of pigs’ blood for him in the microwave (“they were practically giving it away at the butcher’s”), he gives her line-by-line feedback on her prose.

The fundamental flaw in the script is that Olivia overcomes her terror of Luke in about five minutes flat, switching to Twilight-ish fantasies of romance – even after a vampire hunter knocks at her door and Luke’s leather-jacket-wearing vamp buddies begin sniffing around. Barely a drop of dramatic tension remains.

• Red Snow is released on 6 December on digital platforms.