• Directed by Anne Goursaud
• Written by Rick Bitzelberger, Nicole Coady, and Halle Eaton
• Starring
  • Alyssa Milano
  • Martin Kemp
  • Harrison Pruett

I just want you all to know, I didn’t go looking for Alyssa Milano’s breasts, but I’d been seeing the cover of Embrace of the Vampire for a long time, and the only version my local 50¢ rental place had was the unrated cut, so… there they were. Repeatedly. In fact, hers were the only breasts show except for the three nameless almost-nekkid vampire nymphs who appeared pointlessly in the prolog.

Plot, in a nutshell: a few hundred years ago, a man was “embraced” into vampirism, and lost his true love — who, oddly enough, he sees reincarnated as the virginal college freshman Charlotte, played by Milano. (What is it with Milano playing freshman art/art history students who turn into total vamps? She did the same shtick in Poison Ivy 2.)

The vampire (a Nicholas Cage wanna-be) is on deadline, for in three days, if he hasn’t seduced her and drunk her blood, he will “sleep the eternal sleep.” (Why? They never explain it. It isn’t simple hunger — he laps blood from half the campus before the movie ends.) Coincidentally, that day is also Charlotte’s eighteenth birthday, and the day on which she’s led her long-suffering boyfriend to believe that she’ll finally put out (raised in a convent, you know — although I’d always thought the nuns would have taught her to wear a bra once in a while).

Now, this movie had plenty of horror trappings/cliches, including the lame “undead looking for reincarnated lost love” plotline which bored me to tears (and why didn’t my high school guidance counselor steer me toward a creepy-ass gothic campus?), but it was by no stretch a horror movie. It was an erotic thriller in which the part of the sexually obsessed was played by a vampire. (Again, refer back to Poison Ivy 2.) None of the killings were horrific or even suspenseful (just some awkward-looking neck-biting), and the plot was telegraphed from the lame narrated prologue. Vampire wants to seduce Charlotte; Charlotte wants to stay virginal for her boyfriend; boyfriend gets caught in the middle. Add a lesbian photography session, some vampire-induced kinky dreams, and Charlotte turning into a pseudo-goth slut suddenly for no reason, and you’ve pretty much got the entire movie.

Oh, yeah. And Milano’s breasts.