Bite Me
She would probably be happier living in the secluded shadows of a forest but Sarah Woods is in the jungle of the Big Apple, living with her supportive roommates Chrissy and Lily and just about making ends meet as a grave locator for genealogy research, but she doesn’t feel like she belongs and she won’t go with the flow, swimming in the wrong direction and out of sorts with her own people, the vampires.
Having formed a splinter group called the House of Twilight, it doesn’t help that her ex-husband Stacz was one of the most prominent vampires in New York even before he gained internet notoriety for all the wrong reasons following an appearance on a reality television show, Sarah now having to live down a false impression she never created and fend off an IRS investigation into her so-called “church” with its congregation an unholy trinity of three.
Written by Naomi McDougall Jones who also stars as Sarah, defiant in the face of unwanted attention and judgement of her purple hair and facial tattoo, Bite Me is an alternative lifestyle romantic comedy directed by Meredith Edwards, with Christian Coulson as auditor James, breaking the rules to try and help Sarah’s untenable position and violating any semblance of impartiality or appropriate conduct by seeing her outside of work.
Sarah burned by her divorce and continuing reliance on Stacz for blood, she is reticent to engage while the outraged Chrissy (American Horror Story’s always brilliant Naomi Grossman) sees an opportunity for empowerment and liberation, ready to stake her territory beyond the confines of the “vampire community,” a pretentious monthly goth night where conformity with expectation is demanded by those in power, however skewed that baseline may be.
James declaring he’s never met anyone like manic depressive pixie girl Sarah, saddled with the personality of a pair of socks, an overbearing mother and a landlady who holds prayer groups in the front room it is somewhat akin to the Amish being surprised by the computing applications of quantum physics, nor is it believable that someone who resides in the craziest city in the world would be so sheltered any more than that the voracious IRS would conduct its business with the diligence and oversight of an elderly school librarian.
With all the clichés of a Hallmark movie erroneously costumed in dramatic black and gold glitter right down to the sad song montage, Bite Me is well intentioned and earnest in its desire for acceptance and sisterhood but like the thematically similar King Knight it nibbles rather than sinking its teeth, almost naïve in its presumption that outsiders can win the culture war by crashing a party with a costume pageant when it would be better to take a subversive serving of Dinner in America and go down with the sun uncompromised.
Bite Me will be available on Digital Download from Tuesday 8th February
