Tagline(s): | She Could Die. He Can Live Forever. |
This is a cross between Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars. He's just a 2,000-year-old vampire, going back to school to study hematology so he can find cures for blood-borne diseases. She's just a girl who wants to make the world a better place, a Jehovah's Witness who caught AIDS in an epidemiologically implausible accident while rescuing a kid from a militant attack while on a mission trip to Africa. But when they are cast opposite each other as Dracula and Mina in the school play, the sparks fly. Okay, that's a lie. These two have the combined acting talent of a plate of soggy spaghetti. They couldn't generate sparks if they were standing waist-deep in dry pine needles shooting flamethrowers at each other. When Smokey the Bear says, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires," he means them. They have all the chemistry of a kid who didn't graduate high school because he failed chemistry four times. If acting were analogies, they would make this paragraph look like Lawrence Olivier.
Anyway, they get together after school to "practice their lines." They go to a coffee shop. She invites him to church, which would be a problem if he were the sort of vampire who was bothered by sunlight or crosses. At church, after giving a sermon on love, her father the preacher invites him over for dinner. The family has pleasantly stilted conversation. Unfortunately, he may not be the sort of vampire who is bothered by sunlight or crosses, but he is the sort of vampire who can't eat human food, so he has to pull over and barf up a bunch of KFC on the way home. To console himself, he bribes a corrupt bloodmobile driver into selling him a few gallons of blood "for his hematology class project." Meanwhile, she keeps having to go to the doctor because the standard AIDS drugs aren't working on her and her symptoms keep getting worse. They do a bunch more boring stuff and he admits to her that he's a vampire. She invites him over to her parents' for dinner again. He barfs. Her little brother catches him barfing and figures out he's a vampire. He tells Mom and Dad who, on hearing their 10-year-old tell them that his college-age sister's boyfriend is a vampire, tell him to stop messing with his sister and go back to playing video games.
They proceed to lure the boyfriend to the church to burn him at the stake, not so much because he's a 2000-year-old monster who feeds off humanity, but because Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in blood transfusions, which makes the whole vampire thing kind of ooky. Fortunately, our heroine finds out, grabs a gun she finds lying around, and speeds off to church to confront the mob. Naturally, she gets there before any harm comes to him, since even an angry mob can't generate enough sparks to light a bonfire in this movie. But she's got a gun and she's not afraid to use it, gosh darn it, because she's dying of AIDS and she's all out of whatever mild obscenity nice, church-going pastors' daughters run out of. And, to prove her point, she shoots a random parishioner.
Chastened, the mob lets her free him. They go back to his place to cuddle chastely on his couch. She asks him to turn her. He refuses with the usual broody, self-pitying refrain about how awful being immortal is. She counters that, awful as the prospect of eternal life might be, it'll be worth suffering through if only they can spend it together. Also, sucky as it might be to live forever, chances are it will suck less than dying of AIDS at 20. He says he'll think about it.
Then it's off to perform the school play! Wait, what about that whole burning-at-the-stake thing? And the shooting? Is this going to make Thanksgiving awkward? Whatever -- the show must go on! But, fortunately, this movie does not. And what about that title? Well, I think it's a reference to the fact that the legions of Twilight fans crushing after Edward wouldn't let this loser turn them even if he were The Last Vampire on Earth.