Bargain Velvet

The immortal damned show off all their pores in the butt ugly cinematography of 2026's Vampires of the Velvet Lounge. A cast of over fifty year-old guys who used to be in bigger movies and over forty year-old women who used to be in bigger movies help serve up this pastiche of thirty year-old goth movies like Underworld and Repo: The Genetic Opera with a heavy, awkward dose of Sin City.

In one of the movie's awkwardly juxtaposed plots, Dichen Lachman plays Cora, a vampire hunter whose narration she speaks in low gravelly tones, something she clearly has no practice doing because her voice constantly cracks up and down the audible register. She occasionally speaks world-weary, badass lines directly from Sin City. Her assistant, Alex, is played by Rosa Salazar, whom I didn't realise was the girl from Alita: Battle Angel because she doesn't have the huge cgi eyes in this one. Also because she's somehow 41 already. She spends almost the entire movie wearing just a bulky, sparkly t-shirt and enormous black panties, showing this film's attempt to make everything as ugly as possible extends beyond the hair, makeup, and cinematography to include costume design as well.

Mena Suvari, best known as the naked blonde with rose petals from American Beauty, plays the lead, none other than Elizabeth Bathory, who's a vampire in this. It may have been a creative choice to make the woman famously obsessed with youth be the most visibly aged but the makeup and cinematography might have shown her a little more courtesy.

The youngest member of the cast is 32 year old India Eisley who is kind of entertaining and pretty as a vampire afflicted by suicidal ennui but the cinematography even makes her skin look like the surface of the moon.

There's also one guy under 50, 47 year-old Tyrese Gibson who plays one of a trio of guys who used to do higher profile films, the other two being Stephen Dorff and Lochlyn Munro. They're introduced in the most oddly artificial scene in the movie, in a conference room that clearly looks like it was digitally inserted behind them. In fact, I'm pretty sure the three of them were not in the same room for the scene, though we do see them together at a club later on. Tom Berenger and Mark Boone Junior also have small, pointless roles.

The vampires are running an online dating scam in which they lure victims to an absinthe bar. Elizabeth makes a couple of comments about AI to demonstrate this film is bringing this old b movie genre into the 2020s, which would've been nice if the level of insight made me feel like writer/director Adam Sherman had ever spent more than three seconds contemplating the topic.

Oh, yeah, and the effects suck. Its copious computer effects look like a SyFy original movie from 2003.