Once upon a time in Lee’s Summit, Mo., there lived a girl. A girl who dyed bright red streaks into her hair, wore multicolored neon pants and loved young adult vampire romance novels.
She read every vampire book she could get her hands on in the Teen Paranormal Romance section of her local Borders bookstore. It started with “Twilight,” then progressed to series like “House of Night,” “Cirque Du Freak” and “Blue Bloods.” But out of all the YA books she devoured during her spare time, none of them could compare to Richelle Mead’s “Vampire Academy.”
Oh, how she loved “Vampire Academy.” She would spend every evening after school curled up on the couch with the series’ latest release. She giggled at the main character’s sarcasm, grew frustrated as her favorite vamp couples broke up and bawled her eyes out as some of her favorite characters met their untimely demise. She was obsessed.
That girl was 14-year-old Claudia. And now, years after my YA vampire romance novel craze has come to an end, the movie adaptation of “Vampire Academy” has just been released theaters. I owed it to my embarrassingly geeky, 14-year-old self to see it.
However, director Mark Waters has fallen short of his “Mean Girls” masterpiece. “Vampire Academy,” is full of “17-year-old silliness” from Rose (Zoey Deutch), a stony and emotionless Dimitri (Danila Kozlovsky), a twerpy teen who just wants to fit in, and a vindictive vampire version of Regina George. The hand-to-hand combat scenes are stupid; there are multiple jokes poking fun at the “Twilight” saga and a lot of “beeyotch” calling.
“Vampire Academy” is, at best, “Twilight” meets “Harry Potter,” with an overload of everything necessary for a high school flick — BFFs, love, gossip, boy problems, drama, etc. And with the sequel setup at the end, the teenage fan girls can only hope that more movies will follow in upcoming years. There are five other books in the series, after all.
Crushing on your much-older teacher, worrying if the dark, mysterious boy in your grade likes you back and not having a dress to wear for the Equinox dance are the problems that repeatedly arise throughout the plot. It’s sure to make tween girls lose their minds with excitement, but anyone that falls outside of the target audience will be bored stiff with the cliquey, high school drama. So much teen angst. So much sexual tension.
In “Vampire Academy,” Lissa (Lucy Fry) is a Moroi, a peaceful, royal race of mortal vampires. Her snarky BFF, Rose, is a Dhampir — a half-human, half-vampire whose lifelong duty is to guard Moroi from the dreaded Strigoi, who are the scary Dracula-esque vampires we’re used to. They drain their victims of blood and can only be killed with a silver stake to the heart.
After a year of hiding in the human world, Rose and Lissa are captured by hunky Dimitri and forced to return to St. Vladimir’s Academy (or, as Rose calls it, “Vampire Academy”) so Lissa, the heir to the royal throne, can be safe from any Strigoi who want to sink their fangs into her. But once the two are back on campus, they are plagued by a different kind of evil — snobby high school cliques. Apparently, high school sucks even for vampires.
Rose and Lissa soon find themselves harassed by unseen forces. A gutted fox outside Lissa’s dorm, a threatening message written in blood on a wall and a poor dead cat in a backpack are among the spooky happenings at St. Vladimir’s. Who is the culprit? Is it nothing more than teen bullying, or is it something much darker? As Ms. Karp, one of the academy’s professors, says, “Not everything to be feared roams outside the gates of St. Vladimir’s.”
So 14 year-old Claudia’s favorite series finally came to the big screen. Would she have liked it? Admittedly, she did see “Twilight” three times in theaters, so when it comes to “VA,” I’m betting she, like every other young girl going through her awkward stage, would give it two enthusiastic thumbs up.
