
After The Dead Hate the Living! and The Hills Run Red, Dave Parker was starting to be considered the next big name in the horror scene. Later in 2012 he came out with ColdWater, a film that even after getting completed was kept under wraps for four years before being released onto the streaming market as It Watches, derailing any career momentum he had. Over the subsequent years, he has only made one more feature, Puppet Master: Doktor Death, and a couple of anthologies all for Full Moon. His new movie, You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In, is a Tubi Original, and I don’t know if that is an upgrade or downgrade for his career, but at least, it is a direction.
The plot centers on Kelsey (Diana Gardner, Horizon Forbidden West, Vampire the Masquerade – Justice) and her buddy Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach, Annihilation of Self, Inner City Rats) as they ride a train around Italy in order to arrive at the venue of the marriage between Rochelle (Isabella Egizi, Headshots, Sugar Town) and Richard (Davide Nurra, Del mio amore non ridere). Blake scolds her to stop overthinking about her job and start enjoying her vacation, but She definitely has some other issues on her mind.
Kelsey is almost feeling sorry for herself for agreeing to be in the wedding party, partly due to how her friend has changed after becoming an influencer. And largely because she and Richard had a thing before Rochelle came and took him away from her. Still, it is what it is, she is present and she hits the club with the bride to be Blake and the bridesmaid Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach, Twin Flower, Issa). Brianna (Giulia Nunnari, Ryan’s Rhapsody) was supposed to be there with them but nobody can get her on the phone. If they were not lazy to check the prologue, they would understand how come.
Laura Celotti has directed the web series Would you Rather, and a few other shorts like A Little Girl’s Secret, Escape Plan, and The Midnight Place. Her co-writer Mary O’Neil has also written a feature, Second Chance Christmas, plus several other shorts. Last year’s Malum might have shown her face to genre enthusiasts. Although the first several sequences of You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In his sister’s Revenge do not advance the action in any dramatic manner, they manage to sustain tension and incorporate cliche elements like a picture of a woman that is remarkably throughout this portrayal of Kelsey.
Things start to get interesting when the audience is introduced to Victor (Fabián Castro, Paradise Hills, Wild Awakening) who is the owner of the night club they have been going to as well as the villa they have been staying at. Of course, Victor is a vampire and Kelsey is his lost love reincarnated. The guy that Blake was getting some from, Dario (Riccardo Angelini, The Secret of Loch Ness II, Freaks Out) is also a vampire but he comes from a family that has been notorious for being vampire hunters for centuries.
You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In does not take itself too seriously and which you should hope for a film like this, although on occasions one does have to wonder about lines like: “A vampire? What is this, a Twilight movie?” One would have hoped for something slightly tongue-in-cheek for such a low brow film. That said, the filmmakers are not attempting to make anything on the moderate side of things: some thrills and a whiff of decadence are all they aim for, and they do it quite well.
You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In was shot entirely in Italy, making it possible to have an elegant villa serve as the venue for most of the film’s story. I don’t know if the tunnels beneath it were made for the film or are real places, but they do fit nicely into the general terror quota as well. This is a Tubi original and as such, there are not too many effects but those that exist are impressive including a throat slitting and a fleeting shot of a vampire in its primitive state.
On the bright side, the film may not individually relaunch Parker’s career but You Shouldn’t Have Let Me demonstrates that he is able to have some fun with the genre and make a relatively enjoyable albeit generic movie. And I would much prefer to have him do movies like this instead of most of the Tubi Originals that we seem to get all the time.
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