The Thirst (2007)

As an artist, I have a great deal of respect for the process of movie making. I realize that for some people involved, this hypothetical movie that I may be watching, even though it may not be to my tastes, may represent their life's work for some involved in the process. I can see how it is the work product of creative people, and I appreciate their efforts, even if not the end product. For this reason I almost never rate a movie lower than a "5".Then we come to "The Thirst"...... This is a movie that, at the end, makes me want to stand and scream "I WANT MY 2 HOURS BACK!" For the first time (not that it should have been my first perhaps) I sat there as the credits rolled and thought to myself, "that person should be fired by the studio, and that person, and ....." It was brutal. The plot was weak, the camera work was really bad, and the acting was lousy too (in large part to the weak plot). Unless you are conduction a film study or in a class that requires you to see how bad a movie really can be, I would recommend you steer clear of this disaster.

This movie is what we got after a group of marginally talented people sat around and decided that what the world needed more than anything else was a cheap, dumb and low brow knock off of the cult classic vampire flick "Near Dark". The Thirst is trash. But at least it appears to understand what it is and doesn't skimp on any of its trashy appeal.Max and Lisa (Matt Keeslar and Claire Kramer) are two ex-junkies who fall in with a coven of dirty and degenerate vampires. Max takes to his new craving for blood like an addict falling off the wagon. Lisa, even though she's the one who rips out Max's throat to make him a bloodsucker and has no problem having a plasma-drenched threesome with the "mommy" and "daddy" of her vampire family, is fighting the urge to kill to satisfy her thirst. Max and Lisa try to kick the blood habit cold turkey and suffer through withdrawal, but eventually remember they have to stop their fellow vampires from slaughtering a bunch of kids at bible camp. That leads to a bunch of poorly staged fight scenes and the script forgetting what the term "undead" really means.This isn't a good film. The best things you can say about it are that it puts a number of naked bosoms on display and has enough spurting blood to fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Beyond that…Matt Keeslar as Max give a performance like a manic-depressive infomercial host. Jeremy Sisto as head vampire Darius turns his role into an acting exercise, where he sees how many different accents he can use in the course of the film. I supposed Claire Kramer as Lisa is okay, but the rest of the cast is either flat as a board or chews up enough scenery to give themselves very serious intestinal blockages.Director Jeremy Kasten demonstrates the sort of directing skill you can only find on your local public access channel. The nicest thing I can say about his work is that I hope he was going for a "so bad, it's good" vibe for most of the film. That's what I hope. What I believe is that he just sucks.The soundtrack of The Thirst is aggressively horrible, particularly the first half hour of the movie where it seems like every 6 minutes a different yet equally awful song rises up during some poorly conceived montage. By the time it got to an insulting imitation of a Rob Zombie song, I had to fight the urge to turn off the DVD and scour out my ears with steel wool.This script is so stupidly melodramatic and emotionally nonsensical that the combined IQ of the 5 people who wrote it couldn't be higher than 86. It just blindly cribs from other gory vampire films without any effort to bring even one new or interesting notion to the mix.If all you want is boobs and blood, there's enough of both in this movie to leave you vaguely satisfied. You should really want more out of film than that, though.

This film had a fair amount of nudity in it (I have nothing against that :) ) and some very bizarre/bloody scenes. If you are rating this movie for plot, acting, special effects, etc, and overall entertainment value amongst mainstream movies, this film is a failure. If you are looking for weirdness, blood, and nudity (almost all female), then perhaps this movie is for you... but even from that perspective it isn't that great.Plot: C-, Nothing new. There are not really any amazing twists to the story. It's vampires. Most people have seen a vampire movie or two, and this one is not overly unique in terms of plot.Acting: D+, It's pretty terrible. I think the best acting performance is done by the main female character, and she was nothing that great. The main dude was a bad actor. He got better towards the end of the movie, but a 100% improvement wouldn't even be saying much. Most everyone else was bad. Some of the actors were even annoying. I am not sure if this was the role they were given or their acting skill.Special effects: C-, The most prominent effect in this movie was obviously the blood. It seems like every 10 minutes it's a bloodbath. To say it looked fake gives a summary of the quality, but specifically, it looked like anytime someone was injured a pipe of red water just exploded and sprayed all over the place. Ridiculous. The other effects in the movie were pretty crappy too.Character development: D+, There was clearly an attempt at this, as some characters do undergo radical change in this movie, and so one could argue that this movie aspect is better than what I'm indicating. I think the poor acting really killed it for me. A good movie conveys characters in such a way that you understand what they are all about, and you either identify with them or you have some strong opinion about them. In this movie, it's hard to really care.*BEST aspect of this movie: The nudity, cause not much else was worthwhile.*WORST aspect of this movie: You don't care about the characters. Their strangeness combined with the bad acting and some other factors prevent you from really identifying with or at least having a strong opinion of the characters.*OVERALL: I really like vampire movies, and that's why I rented this one, but it was bad. It was annoying in many parts. The characters sucked. The effects were bad. Besides a few redeeming scenes and the aspect I marked as the best movie aspect, it had little to offer.

I thought with the actors in it, and it's rating that it might be OK. I was wrong, here is what I though of it: Film Quality - Same quality as the Airwolf series (after they lost J.M.V.) Sound - Was OK, but you better keep the remote in your hand, so you can turn it up for the dialog scenes, and turn it down for the music scenes. Acting - The lead male sucked, the others I can't fault because the script sucked so bad. Special Effects - Not so special, unless blood really is that orange, and if all humans spray it from small skin injuries. Plot - What plot, it's certainly not what is listed for plot, because that scene was 15 seconds long. The whole movie is like a mix of a late-night Cinemax low budget movie, soft porn movie, and a Rob Zombie video. Wardrobe sucked (although the clothing seemed to magically shed the huge amount of blood that is was constantly being soaked with).If I were a 15 year old Goth-obsessed boy or girl with a confused sense of sexual self, and thought about hurting myself or others, I might have liked this movie. It's not the worst movie I've seen, but it's most certainly not a 6.7. Always remember to look at the total number of people who have voted for a movie, before trusting the rating.MacGyver