Silent Bite (2024)

Some of my least favorite reviews to write are low-budget, independent horror flicks. They're ambitious, they're low budget, they almost always have interesting premises, and - of course - they're almost always pretty bad. Silent Bite, a movie about a group of bank robbers who find themselves hiding out in a mostly abandoned hotel on Christmas Eve alongside a family of hungry vampire dominatrixes, is no exception. Despite some above-average performances and a couple unexpectedly good comedic sequences, the movie leaves you far more bored than you'd think possible given a 90-minute runtime and that premise. 

I should note that I have only tidbits of information about this production. There's no Wikipedia page for the film, and a cursory internet search didn't reveal any in depth articles or interviews. This was made by a small production company that appears to specialize in this sort of thing. It was produced and written by Simon Phillips (who also plays one of the leading roles). Phillips acted in a few mainstream TV shows (including The Witcher and FUBAR, neither of which I've seen). He's also been involved in at least two other low-budget genre movies where he plays characters credited as some variation of Santa Claus or Father Christmas (I'm assuming this is a running gag, rather than a sign of continuity). The director is Taylor Martin, a director and actress who mainly seems to be involved with projects like this. Beyond that, I don't have much information about how or why this was made. 

The movie opens with an animated credits sequence created with (or at least "enhanced" with) generative AI. So, we're not off to a great start. I feel for independent movies that are trying to stretch their money, but this is a very bad look, in more ways than one. That said, this came out last year, when a lot of people were still forming opinions about AI, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The sequence establishes the robbers - all dressed as Santa, aside from one elf - robbed a bank on Christmas Eve and fled to the hotel, where virtually the entire movie is set. More accurately, all but one of the robbers arrive at the hotel: the last (code named Rudolph) leads the police away from the hotel before circling back. But that's much later.

Back at the hotel, Father Christmas, Snowman, Grinch, and Prancer set up a perimeter, which seems... excessive. See, the hotel is supposed to be empty other than the manager, who they're paying off. Only he's also working with the vampires, who....

Okay, there are four of them, all women, as well as a fifth woman their leader is in the process of turning. They are all attractive, they have the usual vampire powers (including not appearing on film, which comes up), and they are all both hungry and horny. The movie makes it explicitly clear they are looking forward to seducing, sleeping with, and feeding from the men.

Oddly, there's never any sex on or even off camera. The vampires try to lure the men into traps, but the only time this method works at all, the movie implies they just killed and ate the guy. Their other attempts all fail for a couple reasons (the most interesting of which is the middle-aged men are suspicious of hot, young women making a pass at them, because that isn't a thing that happens).

With a little work, this could have been spun into something great. A campy comedy of horrors in which over-sexualized vampires are frustrated by their targets' paranoia. To be fair, the seeds of that are in the movie, but it's lost beneath uneven writing and the wrong tone. The scene where the robbers think the women are undercover cops is fun, but it doesn't redeem the cringeworthy setup involving bondage and some baffling dialogue.

The movie also isn't helped by its pace. The movie's well past the halfway point before the vampires actually attack anyone (aside from the woman they're trying to turn). Until then, it's one dialogue sequence after another, most of which doesn't go anywhere or establish anything important. The exception is a scene between Father Christmas, a gruff but kindhearted professional criminal, and Prancer, a former student helping with the heist to pay off a debt to another criminal. The dialogue is atrocious, but the actors (one of whom is credited for writing said dialogue) manage to sell the found family dynamic. It's still not exactly a good scene, but it demonstrates these performers are capable, at least within this genre.

Once the vampires start doing things, the movie picks up a bit. There are a couple bits here where the robbers are trying to figure out what they're up against that are pretty good (one brief exchange I won't give away is actually kind of great). If the whole movie had been scripted like these scenes, this would be a very different review.

The robbers have stun grenades which conveniently use UV light, which is how they're able to defeat supernaturally powerful undead monstrosities. Well, that and a silver spoon Prancer uses to dust one before knowing she's a vampire or that silver hurts vampires. At any rate, the heroes and villains get picked off one by one until it's down to Prancer, the vampire leader, and the girl slowly turning into a vampire. She sacrifices herself to kill the vampire leader, and he escapes. Oh, and Rudolph (having been turned by the vampire leader earlier because she liked him) rises to presumably kill the hotel manager as the end credits roll.

The movie's Christmas elements are a bit odd. It works to keep the holidays present through the codenames and decorations, but there's not much justification in the story or themes. If this had been made a decade earlier, I'd say the filmmakers probably weren't aware of connections between vampire lore and Christmas, but knowledge of the holiday's connections to ghost stories, demons, and all kinds of horror is becoming much more mainstream. The movie is of course structured around a "survive the night" motif, even drawing attention to the fact they have a long time until dawn, so there might be a case for a solstice connection.

Whether or not any of that was intentional, it barely registers while you're watching. The bulk of the movie's dialogue just isn't interesting enough to carry the film, which is a problem given how much of the runtime is resting on scenes of characters talking to each other. Between people talking in circles and the subject matter, I kept having flashbacks to playing Vampire: The Masquerade back in college. There are long sequences that really feel like you're watching LARPers.

In terms of how this rates against other low-budget Christmas supernatural movies, the production values are significantly better than Two Front Teeth or Werewolf Santa - those felt like student films; this feels like it's being made by people with at least a little experience. Though at this level of filmmaking that's a double-edged sword: the better your movie looks and sounds, the higher the expectations rise. On top of that, this isn't as weird as those movies, and maybe it should have been. None of them are in the same league as the actually good holiday vampire flick, Red Snow.

Despite a couple good moments and some solid performances, there's not enough here to appeal to anyone who isn't already a fan of this kind of micro-budgeted filmmaking. This either needed more money or a better script: as it is, there's just not enough to recommend.