Review #361: Red Snow (2021)


Twelve More Slays of Christmas #3 - Red Snow (2021)

Watch it here on Tubi!

Red Snow is the kind of movie where the premise is really all there is to it; once you know the premise the rest of the movie writes itself. This film follows a vampire romance novelist named Olivia living on her own when a wounded bat crashes into her window; she brings the bat in to nurse it back to health and bing bang boom, she's unknowingly befriended Luke, a real-life vampire on the run from some vampire hunters. You could probably jot down a few ideas of where the story goes from there and you would probably be right- Olivia tries to hide Luke's existence from one of the hunters, she develops a budding romance with him, she even gets some feedback on her novel from the subject matter incarnate- and of course, once Luke begins to fall for her, the rest of his vampire buddies show up and they're not happy with how he's gone soft.

Unfortunately, I have to follow this up by saying that the while the premise is all there is to this movie, that's a good and a bad thing. Once you get the premise nothing interesting happens. It hits the exact story beats you expect, when you expect, and nothing else. This movie is also trying to dip its toes into three separate genres (horror, romance, and comedy) and sadly doesn't hit any of the three very hard. The horror is fairly toothless (no pun intended), the romance has very little heart (a little pun intended) and the comedy just isn't funny enough to actually feel like a comedy. (There wasn't even a pun in there because I felt the rule of threes would have been too funny for this movie.) 

I really think this movie should have leaned more heavily into any of those three genres- make it a truly dark and gritty horror movie. Or, have an actual passionate romance instead of just a couple days of flirting between the two leads. Or, lean into the absurdity and actually tell some jokes! Any of those would have been acceptable (all three would have been better). But the movie feels like it either didn't want to or couldn't commit to any of its genres so it ended up as a lackluster entry for all three.

This is a fun movie for the premise alone, but I'd be lying if I said my interest wasn't severely waning by the halfway point. There is a nice little twist/subversion in the last five minutes, which is nice, but it really came too little too late. This film was a nice effort but I think it needed to try just a bit harder.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Fictional Candy Elves

Weird Goof: There is a scene in this film where the vampire hunter is attacking Luke in the garage while Olivia watches on in horror. To knock him out, she walks past TWO metal shovels- which would have been perfect for the job- to instead grab a PLASTIC shovel, which surely wouldn't have worked as well, but when she hits the hunter with the shovel, it still makes a metal sound! I sure hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

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