Love Bite is kind of like American Pie by way of Twilight. It is at its core a story of young boys trying to lose their virginity. It just so happens that their need is more urgent than most, because there’s a werewolf in their town that’s eating virgins. That sounds like a killer concept for a movie, but Love Bite proves to have no teeth. It’s completely inept at fleshing out this concept, the film wasting so much time on dumb things that we’ve all seen before.
]Jamie (Ed Speelers) and his friends are spending their summer vacation in their seaside hometown of Rainmouth. All of them are still virgins, and they’re eager to get rid of that designation. At a party, Jamie meets Juliana (Jessica Szohr), an American travel blogger checking out their town. The two hit it off, and it looks like Jamie might finally have found somebody to be with. Unfortunately, an eccentric fellow named Sid (Timothy Spall) also wanders into town, warning Jamie that he suspects that Juliana might be a werewolf responsible for several recent disappearances in the area.
The movie struggles to find enough story to fill out its runtime. In place of plot progression, it will cut away to check on what Jamie’s friends are doing. And this mostly involves watching dumb kids do dumb things. These scenes are ostensibly meant to be funny, but there isn’t much of a joke in any of them. We watch them play Dance Dance Revolution badly. Or we might see them squirting condiments into each other’s mouths. And none of it really means anything. It just hammers down on the same point: they’re terrible people who are a real waste of time and energy.
And so it is frustrating that the film spends so much of its time and energy on their exploits. Then again, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the protagonist and his tepid romance, either. It’s stretched out to interminability through a series of contrivances. There’s absolutely no urgency in this plotline, despite the eventually revealed danger that Jamie might get killed if he doesn’t get it on with Juliana. It just rambles on and on, orbiting a pair of kids that don’t really seem to have much chemistry between them.
The film wants us to root for them to get together, but there’s nothing there to hold on to. The two don’t really seem to have much of a stake in being with each other. They pretty much get discouraged by every stupid little thing, and neither really seems to be making much of an effort. When the big twist of the film is revealed, their relationship feels even less important. The casting doesn’t do much to help in this regard, either. Ed Speelers isn’t nearly awkward enough to sell the inadequacies of his character with women. And Jessica Szohr is super bland as his paramour.
Love Bite is conceptually not a bad idea. There might be something to twisting these monster romances around to be more frank and open about the latent sexual content of these stories. But the film doesn’t actually have anything to say about all that. It barely strings together a story, most of the movie made up of filler scenes of teenage boys doing remarkably dumb things. Are we supposed to root for them at any point? When the werewolf finally arrives, far too late into the film, one begins to wish everything a prolonged death.
My Rating:
