‘Byzantium’: Finally A Vampire Movie That Looks Good

Pretty much everybody who isn’t a fifteen-year-old girl hates Twilight, and even the middle-school contingent has moved on to better books like The Hunger Games. But studios are still out to exploit vampires, and at least they got a guy who knows his way around fangs to make it.

Neil Jordan is best known to horror fans for Interview With A Vampire, a movie that surprisingly holds up pretty well nearly twenty years later, and to art house patrons for springing a penis on them when they least expected it. Since then he’s mostly made art movies barely anybody watched, something that could change quite a bit now that he’s got attractive women running around beating people up in his movies:

Joking aside, Gemma Arterton is a talented actress, even if she’s mostly known over here for her questionable script choices after being in a Bond movie. And Saoirse Ronan has a long career of awards-bait, for good reason. Having them play mother and daughter promises to make the movie fun to watch acting-wise, at the very least.

Helping is that Jordan can really turn out a thriller, and he seems to have enough of an effects budget to do what we always want to see in vampire movies, namely see them perform superhuman beat-downs and get into fistfights.

This arrives in the UK next week, and it’ll be hitting US theaters June 28th, just in time to see if art, boobs, and blood can defeat a remake of Die Hard With A Vengeance made by the guy who directed Independence Day at the box office. Maybe we’ll make a double-feature of it.

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