The Radleys is a vampire film… a horror (?) comedy (??) about a suburban family of vampires. The parents know what they are and choose to Abstain, their teenage son and daughter don’t know. But when the daughter goes Vegan, it triggers her latent carnivore and she bites a boy (and, as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”). Now the parents have to reveal their family secret… and invite the help of a rogue uncle to help clean up the mess,

Damien Lewis plays both the milquetoast father and the bad boy brother. He brings a charm to both roles. But he doesn’t bring enough to compensate for a pretty poor and scattershot script. I don’t know how hard it is to write a residential vampire film… but I think I could come up with better, more tragic, or funnier material than this.

It starts out ok but after the parents reveal the tooth (I mean, the truth) to their kids, the flick barely seems to know what to do next. And I, frankly, grew deeply bored in the second act and couldn’t have cared less about the third.

There’s nothing to sink your teeth into in this vampire mashup. Some good acting and some very nice cinematography of their small seaside town. But nothing much else.

Score: 68