Theresa and Allison

During my viewing of Theresa and Allison and later, during my writing of this review, the one main thought/feeling that kept occurring to me was, “god I’m just so tired.” Admittedly, I’m not sure if this feeling was entirely because of the movie or because of larger issues like living on a dying planet and whatnot. Either way though, Theresa and Allison is not a good movie and I am very, very tired.

Theresa and Allison is a vampire movie taking place in modern day New York. The unsuspecting Theresa is turned into a vampire after a disastrous one-night stand. Poor Theresa, her maker doesn’t sick around to show her the basics of being a vampire so Theresa learns how to vampire all by herself. Enter Allison. Allison is another vampire who becomes immediately interested in Theresa. Despite being previously heterosexual, Allison splits up with her long-term boyfriend and very quickly tries to get Theresa into a relationship. Theresa agrees, but not before spending an evening with Allison’s sleazy ex who claims he’s showing her the ropes of being a vampire. Later, Allison invites Theresa to a party held by her vampire mother. Here, Theresa meets Allison’s vampiric clan and struggles with the inherent cruelty to humans that is part of being a vampire.

Despite the title being their two names, Theresa and Allison don’t spend a lot of the movie together. I guess it’s nice that Theresa gets to be a fully-realized lesbian character who has a life outside of kissing girls and all. But on the other hand, this is the least engaging or sexy queer vampire romance I’ve ever seen. Their relationship is rushed and lacks chemistry. I don’t care about their relationship long-term nor within the confines of the movie. As someone who lives and dies for queer vampire relationships, that’s a pretty big failure.

I saw one review, likely written by a crew member or friend comparing the film to the works of Jean Rollin. But beyond both having lesbian vampires, there are no similarities. The films of Jean Rollin have three things that Theresa and Allison lacks. Rollin films are old, foreign and sort of bougie. Rollin’s vampires live in crumbling castles in the French countryside and stuff. The vampires in Theresa and Allison live in shitty houses in modern day New York. Put simply, these vampires are not aspirational. The vampires in Theresa and Allison are sleazy and have no fashion sense. Nothing to aspire to at all. Their use of vampires really feels like the writers thought if they take boring characters but make them vampires, it would make them cool. It doesn’t. It just makes the vampires in their movie super lame.

There’s some tonal issues to the film as well. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a dark comedy. There are the occasional line and some of the characters are so over the top. But there’s not enough things I recognized as intentional jokes to be certain if that’s the case. Plus, in the last act, it does get fairly dark. I actually liked that. There is fairly disturbing casual cruelty and discussion of such within the third act that was fairly effective. Unfortunately, that comes too late in the movie’s two hour run time and is softened by some of the over the top characters.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if your movie is low-budget, there is no reason for it to exceed 90 minutes. Use what little resources you have to make every minute count. Theresa and Allison doesn’t do this. It runs 2 hours. It absolutely did not need to. There’s definitely at least 30 minutes that could be cut from this movie. Far from detracting from the film, it would probably add to it. Every time I see an overly long low-budget movie, I get the feeling that the creators think the film is a lot better than it actually is. Theresa and Allison is no exception.

Theresa and Allison is bad to look at. There’s a slightly blurry filter over a lot of the shots. It makes the movie feel like a 90’s indie movie except there’s nothing new, fresh, edgy or dangerous. Also this movie was released in 2019. You can get much better cameras for cheaper prices nowadays. You can even shoot a pretty nice looking movie on an Iphone. So I’ve gotta assume at least part of the reason the movie looks so shitty is creative choice. It was the wrong choice.

On the plus side, the sound in this movie is really good. Usually, when a movie looks as bad as Theresa and Allison does, the sound is as bad if not worse. Not here. The sound quality is really clear and the mixing is really solid. Good job to everybody in the sound department.

There’s nothing new in Theresa and Allison. None of the ideas here are something you couldn’t find in other pieces of vampire media. And I don’t necessarily need my vampire media to have new ideas either. I just want the ideas they do have to be executed competently. Theresa and Allison didn’t do that. It thinks it’s a better, edgier and more unique movie than it actually is. But as a pretty hardcore fan of vampires, Theresa and Allison offered me nothing new nor any competent takes on old ideas.

Overall rating: 4.1/10

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