Red Snow (2021) – Film Review

A struggling vampire romance novelist named Olivia Romo (Dennice Cisneros) must defend herself against real-life vampires during Christmas in Lake Tahoe.

Sean Nichols Lynch‘s Red Snow is one of those strange and awfully disappointing films that start off quite promising, but with each passing scene, it just gets worse and worse to the point where you have to eventually come to terms with the fact that it’s not going to win you over by the end. The film actually starts off with some truly suspenseful atmosphere and features a genuinely remarkable opening five minutes where, in that time, not a single piece of dialogue is spoken.

It’s sort of like this ominous way to let viewers into the story, but sadly, after those first five minutes are up, the rest of the movie to follow takes a considerable nosedive into the unintentionally hilarious territory. I always like to go into movies completely blind if I can. Gone are the days where I do a Google search on plot synopsis.

Maybe I would’ve disliked this movie less had I actually looked up what it was about beforehand because this is essentially just a parody of Twilight meets In the Mouth of Madness. Although Twilight is definitely not a good film, it’s certainly ten times better than this disaster of a movie. And yes, it’s definitely nowhere near as good as Madness.

The story of a vampire novelist who finds out that there are real-life vampires coming to get her during the Christmas season is actually an incredibly fun concept and one that could’ve been truly entertaining had the right script been written. Sadly, the one that was used here – written by Lynch – simply doesn’t know how to be campy and self-aware. Instead, it seems as though he thought he was writing something legitimately good.

As soon as Nico Bellamy‘s Luke first appeared and delivered his first set of lines, I had a terrible feeling that the movie was now about to divulge into nothing more than insufferable parody, and sadly, that feeling was correct. Listen, I’m all for parodies if they’re done right. Scream is the best parody film ever made perhaps. Yet Red Snow never finds anything clever to say, unlike Scream which found hilarious and brilliant ways to poke fun at movie tropes.

This could’ve been the Scream for the vampire genre of films but instead, it actually ends up being even more insufferable than the Twilight films. So in attempting to make a film that pokes fun at how silly those kinds of movies are, Sean Nichols Lynch made one that’s even worse.