BLISS RATING: ★★★+
“The undead did not love, but they remembered love with a savage loyalty.” – Kim Harrison, A Perfect Blood
Perhaps with a little more oomph, this series might have been great. As presented, I rather enjoyed some, but not all of it. This is another vampire series in what has now become a redundancy of them. Each, I am guessing, trying to be unique but none honestly supplanting the original concept. This one also tried but was only partially successful. It all still felt so ‘tired’ to me. While there were some parts to this vampire tale that were unique, there is not enough to make it outstanding and the holes-in-logic throughout are just ginormous. The story begins with a rather interesting nucleus despite the intricacies to its subplot tending to get a bit wonky for me. Nevertheless, I kind of enjoyed the development; I just wish they would put some ‘life’ into the characters.
Punn (Prem Warut) is an expert restorer of antiques. He keeps having a reoccurring dream of making love with an exotic man with a ruby red pendent hanging from his chest. Punn is also secretly a “Hunter”, a trained assassin from a clandestine organization that hunts down and destroy vampires. Punn and two other friends made it their life’s mission to destroy all vampires because they had convinced themselves that they were the only ones who survived a vampire carnage when they were young and vowed to take revenge. (For those who are Roman Catholic, you might become mildly upset. Having been one, I was not). So, they formed this organization to do so. Now, however, Punn is wanting out, as he has just reconnected with his younger brother, Pokpong (Stamp Panachkorn) and he does not want him to be exposed to any of these sordid activities.
Punn is asked to take one last job that is likely to destroy the head of the vampire family. While Punn is attempting to fix the vampire painting of the enticing portrait of the vampire master, an accidental connection that awakens him. And it happens to be the individual he has been dreaming about. Therefore, Punn is simply unable to kill Ramil (Boun Noppanut), the leader of the family of vampires. Although Punn was sent to kill him, he instead ends up giving him enough of his own blood to make him fully recover from the curse that was put on him by Lilith the Mother of Demons. Ramil is unique and a bit of a mystery. He does not want to kill humans let alone drink their blood even though that is a part of his nature. Deep down, he does not seem to want to be the master of the vampires anyway and would prefer to lead a simple basic life with Punn with whom he now knows he is inextricably connected to.
Ramil has an entourage of servants that not all of whom have steadfastly remain loyal to him after over a century of being locked up in the painting. While his faithful servant, Methas (Mark Jiruntanin), is steadfast, the other two have taken different paths. Mekhin (Aun Napat), while committed to Ramil, has taken a traditional road of being a healer and has become a doctor. In an interesting twist of fate, Pokpong works at a convenience store close to the hospital where Mekhin practices and the two have become friends. In a sense and quite indirectly, Mekhin has helped heal the strain in the relationship between the two brothers. Ciar (Barcode Tinnasit) takes a more confrontational approach to humanity and simply does not want to trust them at all. Ciar frequently clashes with humans and can turn into a crow, making it easy to spy on them.
Who really S.T.O.L.E. this series? To be honest, there are way too many characters who have significant roles in this series. With so many, it is hard to focus on any one particular individual because each is specifically limited but intense. And frankly, the acting is just so-so. They tended to be a bit mechanical and one-dimensional in whom they were representing. However, the one who gives it a greater shot in terms of forcefulness is Barcode Tinnasit as Ciar. He at least gives Ciar a personality that we can identify with and understand, and he does make the most of his character. Besides being handsomely sinister, he tries and makes Ciar multi-dimensional and makes him more complex. He became at least multi-faceted.
The success of a series is assessed by whether its strengths outweigh its flaws. Granted the whole approach to what vampires were and how they could co-exist with humans was different, and parts of it were entertaining, but these were not enough to create a sustainable interest throughout this series. It fell flat very fast.
The first area where it fell flat is the relationship between Punn and Ramil. It was boring. I am not sure if we are ever going to see real genuine passionate love connections between guys in a Thai BL anymore. Actors merely seem to have low energy with no affect delivering lines in monotone voices, with personas displaying no personalities and that seems to be the modus operandi. In this way, one does not have to create anything but the absolute bare minimum in terms of delivery and execution. For Prem Warut and Boun Noppanut, their delivery and response, in fact their whole demeanor, does not show one ounce of genuineness that they are remotely in love. Sure, they go through the motions, but there is no honesty in those motions. It comes across as fake and therefore it is fake. Do not get me started in your phony kissing scenes. Better to have silhouetted those scenes than to have shown cringey kissing scenes, looking like you both are forced to do it. I am getting so sick of the contrivance of Thai BLs anymore. Sure, Prem and Boun can do some emotional scenes well, but when it came to actual intimacy, it became another forced, tried-and-try formulaic Thai Bl standard format, showing no passion, desire, or even vulnerabilities with one another. The audience has gotten so used to this that it has now become ‘accepted’. But people in love (which includes gay people) just do not act or behave like this with one another and stop pretending that they do.
The holes in the story, as I stated, are self-evident. The story itself lumbers along, feeling very staged. The dialogue given, sounding just like a script reading, is unemotional. The fight scenes were atrociously bad and laughably bad. I still do not know how Punn and Ramil got in and out of a painting. I might have understood Ramil as he is a vampire but how Punn gets in and out so easily is a real mystery. The other plot holes that I have always been told is a truism is that once you have been bitten by a vampire, you yourself become one. Well, this is not the case – apparently a vampire can take away his own bite. Ramil’s visit into Punn’s mind got too silly and banal and at the end made no sense whatsoever.
We do need to discuss just for a moment what a terrible older brother Punn was to his younger brother Pokpong. For some reason, while not a major issue for the story, it bothered me. Having recently reconnected with his brother, he at minimum became tone-deaf at best and uncaring at most in his treatment of his brother. Long swaths of time passed before he even remotely wondered what was happening with his brother. Punn’s personality is so self-centered, which is so typical of protagonists in these series, that I found his lack of being upfront and honest because it might be painful for him, is yet another reason why these series do not work for me. Had there been honesty from the beginning, perhaps one would have had totally refreshing and creative storytelling, not based on trite and cliché tried and true warmed-over platitudes.
Although this series is enjoyable, it’s likely to fade from memory after only a short time. And perhaps that is the point of this series. As it does seem to be setting itself up for a Season 2, perhaps going off in a different direction.
Leave a Reply