Film Review: “Girls Just Wanna Have Blood” Is Tactless, Terrible and Technically-Flawed
Written by: Matt Patti | May 25th, 2020
Girls Just Wanna Have Blood (Anthony Catanese, 2019) ½ out of 4 Stars.
When one is viewing a film that fails at almost all levels, what is one to do? One could suffer through it, nitpicking through every terrible choice and pointing out every flawed aspect; or, one could sit back, relax, and enjoy the mess in front of them for what it is, laughing at some of the absurdly terrible things they’re seeing. With Girls Just Wanna Have Blood, I chose the latter. Throughout the first half, I was debating giving this film 0 out of 4 stars, but when I decided to let the film take me along in its awful ride, I had a (slightly) better time.
Girls Just Wanna Have Blood is directed by Anthony Catanese and revolves around teenage vampire girls introducing a new, normal girl into their friend group, and eventually into the vampire life. Constantly bloodthirsty, the girls must target new victims each day in order to fulfill their hunger. When the members of a motorcycle bar begin to go missing, however, people start to become suspicious. Now, the vampire girls must fight to stay alive.
The plot I’ve managed to describe above occurs solely in the second half of the film. The first half is a downright mess of random, ineffective scenes, mostly revolving around cheesy sexual encounters that lure men in as food for the vampires, pointless detailed conversations about sex, and stupid teenage drama that exists solely to have something happen in these empty scenes that are devoid of any noteworthy aspects. The film feels very long at just under two hours, which is rare, but I wouldn’t mind if the entire first half of the film were cut.
The first thing one notices in this film are the terrible technical elements: every single technical feature of this film has a problem. I’m not talking about stylistic choices, although I didn’t like most of those, either. I’m referencing inexcusable mistakes that made this film seem like a student-made film. Recently graduated from a university film program, myself, I’ve seen many common filmmaking mistakes in my own and my peers’ films in our early years that I also see here. The image quality is horrendous at times, with some scenes overly blurry and grainy. Also, the lighting in a single scene will change drastically from one shot to the next. The worst part is the audio. The dialogue is barely audible at times, and at other times certain characters’ voices will have room noise that doesn’t match the setting they’re in, as if their dialogue were recorded in another room, which it probably was. The editing suffers from jarring cuts that aren’t seamless at all, and some edits seem there to try to cover up the subpar filmmaking with obnoxious effects, color, and sound choices that come off as laughable.
Aside from the poor production value, the other aspects of the film are nothing special. The plot is unremarkable, especially the pointless first half of the film. It picks up slightly in the second half, with some more interesting scenes and one scene that actually made me chuckle. The performances are nothing to write home about, and some are quite bad, but not the worst I’ve seen. I will give the film props for its diverse casting of female vampires, however. The characters are mildly interesting, if only to see what life as a vampire is like, but the film steers more towards an abundance of sex and overly gross, but laughably poor, blood and gore effects.
Overall, I can’t say I had a miserable time. It is quite lacking in many ways, yes, but it gave me a sense of nostalgia of my times watching some early college student films! It also had me laughing a few times, most of which came from either overly cheesy effects work or strange line choices that felt completely out of place, but one of which came from a genuinely funny scene. The 0.5 of a star is for the laughs and the diverse casting of the female vampires. Other than for those two aspects, though, I cannot think of anything else this film did well. I often questioned while watching it how this was the final cut, and why reshoots and/or re-edits were not done. Overall, unless you’re one that enjoys tearing a film apart and laughing at all of its failures, I would recommend staying far away from these girls who want blood.
Matt Patti
Matt Patti has enjoyed voicing his opinions on films from a young age. He has lived in the Baltimore, Maryland, area since 2015 and is a graduate of Stevenson University’s Film & Moving Image program. Matt is currently back at Stevenson University, working as the School of Design, Arts, and Communication's Studio Manager.