Watch Vampire Academy Online The family line for the teenage flick “Vampire Academy” may trace back to “Dracula,” but the recycling policy is strictly from “Frankenstein.” Directed by Mark Waters and written by Daniel Waters, his brother, this genre rehash takes a helping of “Harry Potter,” a measure of “Mean Girls” and elements from various teenage adventures, monster movies and queen-bee stories and recombines the borrowed parts into an unsurprisingly familiar tale. What is surprising is that while the patchwork whole creaks terribly in places, the parts also show signs of life.
Watch Vampire Academy Online Based on Richelle Mead’s young-adult juggernaut, the movie cherry-picks components from the vampire mythology and repurposes them for mainstream appeal. There are fangs, blood and death here, but also loads of drama, school rivalries and super-cute guys with anguished haircuts. The good vampires, the Moroi, may drink blood, but they’re also magical and, ridiculously, mortal. They can walk in the sun, although it helps to have gloves, shades and a fetching parasol. The Moroi aren’t your great-grandmother’s Transylvania exotics, slipping like mist through open windows after dark: They’re thoroughly modern, civilized types who meet their sanguineous needs by drinking from human volunteers in a gleaming white facility that’s the vampire equivalent of a juice bar.
Watch Vampire Academy Online The story centers on the teenage besties Rose (Zoey Deutch) and Lissa (Lucy Fry), who are bonded by blood and narrative contrivance. Rose is a half-human and half-vampire called a Dhampir, and the guardian in training for Lissa, a Moroi princess. When the movie opens, Rose and Lissa are on the lam, having run away sometime earlier from their school, St. Vladimir’s Academy, because of some kind of complicated threat. They’re soon hauled back to school by some men in black, including a stud with a ponytail, Dimitri (an appealing Danila Kozlovsky), though after fending off a gaggle of bad vampires. These are the resident villains, the Strigoi, immortals whose red eyes suggest cheap special effects and hangovers. The Strigoi are trouble, but less so than some of the other kids.
Watch Vampire Academy Online There’s more, although the soap-opera details of who did what and why to whom are formulaic and uninvolving. Mark Waters (who directed “Mean Girls” and “Freaky Friday”; Daniel wrote “Heathers”) doesn’t seem especially interested in the supernatural parts of “Vampire Academy,” and he clearly didn’t have the budget to make what little hocus-pocus there is magical. He doesn’t do much with the camera, but he manages the material with a winking irreverence that makes the movie breeze right along. And as Mr. Waters has in the past, he brings a conspicuous sympathetic touch to his handling of the younger performers, especially Ms. Deutch and Ms. Fry, but also Sarah Hyland as a school misfit and Dominic Sherwood as the regulation darkly brooding beauty.
