Darker Side of Romance (2004)

A 53-minute home-made-looking effort thrown into one of those ten-films-for-the-price-of-one DVD boxes. Davis Schroud, a creepy-looking guy, wanders around the night, occasionally getting into violent situations where he bites or is bitten (making this a semi-vampire movie). He notices a girl in the park who has recently told her best friend that she's dissatisfied with her cleancut-looking boyfriend Flip and is looking for something more - Davis comes along and asks her out, but Flip gets in the way and makes him scarper, then poaches some flowers he leaves for her and beds the drunken best friend. It winds up with a scuffle between the brooding psycho who is really a romantic and the handsome lunk who is really an asshole, but nothing much is resolved. Even at its brief length, it seems padded - with conversations that drone on for aching minutes and time-outs to discuss unrelated matters. The usual lo-lo budget whiny music is employed and the actors all have that scrubbed awkwardness common to their level of the profession - it looks slick-ish, in widescreen video, with a few attempted atmos/distortion effects. On the whole, it feels like a short story.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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