 |
| All Images Courtesy: Cleopatra Films/MVD |
Just in time for the holidays, Cleopatra Entertainment and MVD Visual have released the new holiday horror film Silent Bite on blu-ray. A low-budget indie that mashes up a heist movie and a vampire siege film, set on Christmas Eve, Silent Bite certainly deals in very familiar tropes and story elements, but it does so with ambition beyond its budget, and a clear desire to make something genuinely good. Is it able to pull off a Christmas miracle as a worthy new piece of holiday horror? Or does it get a lump of coal in its stocking? Let’s take a look at Cleopatra’s new disc and find out!
It's a snowy Christmas Eve, and a group of thieves dressed in Santa suits have just robbed a bank and made their getaway. They arrive at a hotel on a rural stretch of highway, where they’ve bribed the owner to give them shelter until the cops are off their track. But they aren’t the only ones who the unscrupulous hotel owner has made a deal with: the hotel is also the home base for a tribe of vampires, who are waiting for the thieves with plans to turn them into Christmas dinner. The criminals soon find themselves in a siege situation, trying to make it through until sunrise while holding the vampires at bay. The premise reads a bit like a Christmas-movie version of From Dusk Till Dawn, and that’s not far off: Silent Bite wears its influences on its Santa-suit sleeves in a big way, and the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino vampire film is absolutely one of the main ones. Indeed, this movie owes a lot to Quentin Tarantino, as well as Guy Ritchie, with its central characters and their story feeling very much like a ‘90s-crime-cinema pastiche. Fortunately, it is also able to find its own voice and grow beyond these influences, delivering a surprisingly fun, if somewhat scrappy, horror film.
When the movie starts, the initial setup is so indebted to its obvious cinematic influences that I was worried that the whole thing might just be a retread of other, better films. We have a band of criminals with codenames who have just carried out a heist for a mob boss and are now in hiding at the safehouse, straight out of Reservoir Dogs, and we even get a holiday-themed riff on the “why am I Mr. Pink?” bit. Most of the thieves are working-class Brits with Cockney accents, a la Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch, though the film is set in Upstate New York. And yes, criminals on the run whose chosen hideout turns out to be a vampire den is indeed an awful lot like From Dusk Till Dawn, with at least a touch of Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers. But while at first the similarities to these other films feel unwisely on-the-nose, to the point of constantly calling up unkind comparisons, once the thieves settle into the hotel and the plot starts to get moving, Silent Bite does find its own voice, and differentiates itself. It remains an affectionate love-letter to 90s crime cinema, no doubt, but it does have a personality of its own and is not just a rip-off. It also becomes clear very quickly that director Taylor Martin and writer/star Simon Phillips are not here to make a cheap knockoff: they have ambition, style, and a knack for fast, quippy dialogue, and they are clearly striving to make a genuinely good movie on a tight indie budget. The result may be a mixed bag, but they go for it with admirable ambition, and they make sure that the resulting movie is genuinely a good time.
Once it finds its own voice beyond the Tarantino/Ritchie pastiche, Phillips’ script is quite good in its strongest moments, with witty, rapid-fire pulp dialogue that works well, and some genuinely strong character beats. The moment when I realized that Silent Bite is better and more thoughtfully-crafted than my initial skeptical assessment was a very good dialogue scene between the gruff but sympathetic leader of the team, played by Phillips himself, and their out-of-his-depth young tech expert, as the two discuss their motivations for being there, and the older thief’s regrets. It would be very easy for a film like this to just let the characters be derivative archetypes who are lined up for the slaughter, but Philips seeks to give them depth, humanity, and motivation which I didn’t expect to find here. The interplay between the characters is absolutely the film’s strongest aspect: the older thieves are believable as working-class buddies who trade barbs but care about each other, and the mentor relationship between Phillips’ leader and the team’s awkward youngest member lends the group some humanity. Other aspects of the script are a good deal more uneven, and the plot certainly has its contrivances and its cheesy moments, but when the script works it works quite nicely.
Likewise, the film is technically a mixed bag, as one might expect from a low-budget indie that is trying to do a lot with a little, but its strongest aspects are quite strong, and show genuine artistry. Director Martin and cinematographer Timothy Davis choose to shoot the film in 2.35:1, and they craft some strong visuals and good shot compositions. The film’s vampires are also very effective, blending pulp-gothic costuming with pretty well-designed low-budget makeup which gives them quite a unique look (instead of Buffy-esque vamp-face, when they bear their fangs and go for the kill, these vampires develop black veins on their face and around their eyes). The movie also judiciously uses some pretty solid CGI to allow the vampires to move around inhumanly fast (Anne Rice style), and for the very Buffy-style exploding-into-dust when one is killed.
As expected for an indie like this, the acting is fairly uneven, but the strongest cast members, particularly Simon Phillips and Luke Avoledo as our two main characters, are quite good. They both bring a welcome, unexpected depth to the characters with their performances, and they handle the script’s balance of straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek quite well. As the queen of the vampires, Sala de Goede gives an okay performance in terms of line delivery, but has a great physicality that makes her an imposing presence as the villain. Others in the supporting ensemble are weaker, but overall everybody gets the job done.
There are some other rough spots along the way – some pretty dodgy ADR to overdub some dialogue in post, uneven quality to the audio recording in general, and a climax that struggles to deliver the scope of action that it is trying to provide. But many of these things are expected struggles of a fairly lo-fi indie that is trying to stretch its resources to fit its ambitions, and I found myself easily forgiving most of these flaws. Despite my initial skepticism, Silent Bite wound up pulling me in, and I genuinely had a good time with it, and really dug what it was trying to do. I would say it was successful at achieving its goals at least a decent amount of the time, if not entirely. It’s a mixed bag which certainly isn’t a great film, but if you enjoy low-budget indie horror, and seeing what filmmakers are able to do with limited resources, there is a lot to like about its DIY charm and ambition. It may not be a new holiday classic in the making, but it’s a fun seasonal horror film for those who appreciate homegrown efforts like this. I think it is well worth checking out.
- Christopher S. Jordan