Technically, The Invitation is a little hard to talk about without spoilers… the movie’s structure is obviously hiding something. But the trailers already spoil everything… so thanks advertising department. So I’ll go ahead and spoil it too, I guess (starting with the SPOILER WARNING below).

The Invitation is about an American woman who takes a DNA test and finds she has relatives in England. She’s invited to visit and stay at their fancy-pants lordly estate and everything is going swimmingly… except for the creepy butler and the demons? Witches? Ghosts? Werewolves? Vampires? Communists? Roll the dice on what’s going bump in the night (and delivering stock movie scares).

The flick takes a while to get going… it probably has too much build-up which necessitates cheap spook show moments that won’t scare anyone. It’s going for a gothic style that it more-or-less nails, but the usual haunted house clichés might just make you yawn.

it wasn’t looking good for this one… it wasn’t exactly bad though. Just really generic and kind of unnecessary.

<SPOILER WARNING>

But once the shoe drops and they reveal that this was a vampire movie all along, it sheds its generic gothic style and embraces the camp. It turns into a fun little B movie… though one that’s still at-war with its original stylings. It seems hesitant to fully engage and keeps one foot planted in its original tone and the other in a slightly over-the-top vampire flick. It’s unfortunate because, when the fun moments hit, I was grinning ear to ear since the movie clearly knew what it was doing and was having fun with it.

</SPOILER WARNING>

So it’s an uneven movie and it unfortunately meanders a bit too much. This isn’t the strongest of 3 star ratings, but I think it’s solid enough when it’s not fun, and plenty of campy fun when it is.

Score: 75