I admit that I had no idea what I was walking into with this film. Cineworld were offering an Unlimited Screening for this movie (forever ago! and I thought meh why not? The vague synopsis I caught was something about vampires but I didn't bother watching the trailer and I didn't bother googling it. Sometimes I just like to wander into a movie with no prior knowledge and let it consume me.
So the story here follows a lass called Evie. She's recently lost her mum and is feeling a little low as not only is she now an orphan but doesn't have any family at all. She joins this trace my heritage site and finds she's got a british cousin who flies over to America to introduce himself. He invites her to a wedding to meet the rest of the family and she's got the hots for the host of the huge mansion and grounds which is hosting this do. They get it off. She's starting to wonder when she's actually going to meet the bride and groom when the hot guy springs it on her that she is the bride. This is when she finds out that the two women who were introduced to her as the bridesmaids are actually his two other brides, and he's a vampire and is part of this century old thing where he needs to be married to a woman from three of these old families to stay immortal. His original wife from Evie's family recently passed away so hence the scout for her. Evie then decides to fight for her life and boom it's an escape movie.
So back to the Vampire thing. I caught pretty early on that we might be watching some kind of twisted rendition of Dracula. What I absolutely adored was the fact it wasn't really about him at all. This was a retelling of the Brides of Dracula. I can't say I have ever seen an angle like this before. To my knowledge the brides were only briefly featured the first time around. But now they are front and center. We know there were three but that was about it, now they have a story. Now that we have this I want more, we need more of the Brides.
I had no idea who anyone was in this movie aside from Sean Pertwee and the bloke from The Windsors who is our main gals cousin. I love Mr Pertwee and his costume and likeness is eerily similar to his performance in Gotham which is one of my favourite TV shows ever. This man seems to have been born to play a butler, and if Bruce Wayne evolved into a vampire rather than Batman then this could have been the same thing.
I see a lot of talk on the internet at the moment about the Bisexual gaze. If ever there was a movie which embodied that then it is this. Everyone in this film was stunning, everything anyone did was elegant and sexy and adored with gothicness and riches. You either wanted to be or be with half the cast. This movie is a goddamn sin.
The Invitation left me wondering if I found myself in Evie's position, would I rebel as she did or would I go along with it? I am pretty into my vampire lore, I do like a cheeky vamp story as long as it is not Twilight. Young Dracula is to blame for this. I mean on one hand you have money, power, and immortality. On the other you have to share your husband and you are restricted to only doing certain things. Also the murder thing. That is an issue although I am certain there are ways around that. I just don't know if I am dedicated enough to stay human, Evie clearly was although she clearly liked the power that came with vampirism. She obviously got a confidence boost as well as she went all vigilante at the end of the movie once the threat was over.
Apparently our main vampiric man used to be a Disney boy. This was obviously well after I stopped watching Disney Channel as I have never seen him before in my life, but hats off to him, he plays a very good romantic guy as well as a threat. In fact all of the people in this movie were very sexy and yet played the villain so well. I enjoyed it, I haven't seen a movie with this much balance in a long time. I would even go as far as saying that The Invitation caught the essence of the original Dracula (as in the book by Bram Stoker) unlike the over played rendition of Bram Stoker's Dracula (the movie) which was a muddled sexfest.
The Invitation was sexy, it was gothic, it was gory. It made you lust after the story and question your morality which I think was the intention of the original narrative all along. It made you question what you would do if faced with this position. Would you be selfish and cave in for all that was offered or would you choose the allotted life you were given?
Despite all this The Invitation gets a 6/10. While I absolutely adored the film, this was a B movie, if that. No one has really heard of it, I see it being on Netflix or something similar within the next few months and becoming a gothic staple, but it wasn't a wow moment, it's a guilty pleasure kind of movie.
Leave a comment, tell me would you live on as a human or would you let yourself be seduced by the vampiric life?!
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