mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"You know, I really wouldn't sweat the details, Todd. Right now you got exactly the length of this cigarette to come to terms with the fact that for once in your life, it's just not gonna work out for you."
Todd is the perfect character name for a misogynist asshole character. I apologise to all actual Todds out there, many of whom are perfectly nice people. but we all know this is true. Todd doesn't last very long in this movie because he gets promising-young-femaled by a lesbian vampire.
That's not really what the movie is about though. Well, it is, but there's been quite a lot of thematic material shoved down this movie's gullet and then, in turn, shoved down ours. Our main character, Laurel, is trans. Her best friend at home is gay and has the hots for her brother. She falls in with a gang of lesbian vampires. They won't let men become vampires any more because men get power crazy and can't be trusted. So there's toxic masculinity and gender-reversed retribution/social justice and queer expression and it's all swirled up into a bloody cocktail whose Millennial tang I was convinced - like, fully convinced after five minutes - was going to turn me off completely. And then miraculously, Bit turned out to have a fair bit of finesse in negotiating all this messaging elegantly and non-obnoxiously. I mean, it's a bit obnoxious for a Gen-Xer like me, but only a little bit. I forgive it. (I'll stop doing that now, btw, I know it's a bit irritating).
I think lead Nicole Maines got famous because of a legal case, and so her casting could be seen as pretty cynical, but she acquits herself fairly well. Diana Hopper (who I just assumed was some relation to Dennis because she looks so much like him but apparently not) is strong as lead vamp, Duke. Conversely James Paxton looks nothing much like his dad but he gets a feature monologue and you can really hear good old Bill's twang there in his voice. You know you're becoming old when you spend the whole time talking about the parents of the cast of the movie.
So I was not encouraged by the fairly vacuous dialogue and derivative first act, which is so clearly emulating a gender reversed Lost Boys with a hint of queer Near Dark. But as the film moves on, it displays a lot more depth - firstly in terms of its world building (we come to learn that male vampires are to be avoided because the last guy, Vlad, was both megalomaniacal and powerfully psychic - he had kept all the female vampires under mind control, which is a pretty neat metaphor for male emotional abuse and control of women) and then, secondly, in terms of character development.
Right when we seem to be about to descend into a conventionally mindless third act, Laurel faces the ramifications of her own tortured personal journey to becoming trans (which is never dwelt on to this point, treated entirely as backdrop), and it's not what you'd expect. Without making her sexuality or gender the topic of discussion, we learn about how her emotional ordeal has shut her brother out of the emotional family support he needed. It sounds petty, but it doesn't play out that way - in fact, this film's towering strength is not making these issues the surface subject of any of the narrative - even though they are clearly fundamental to the film's entire thesis. It's surprisingly thoughtful stuff - subtle in some ways, not so subtle in others, but always smart.
It perhaps lacks a little actual action or horror, becoming more a sort of heightened teen melodrama, so it's not necessarily what I would want from a horror movie. But this is a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. We get so few LGBTQ films, and the pressure on those which are made to adequately "represent" a whole segment of culture can be too heavy to result in becoming more than a grab bag of cringey cliche and sometimes insultingly on-the-nose messaging. Bit is the sort of movie that, while clearly having these issues top of mind, is able to just confidently be its own thing. It's actually a pretty powerful expression of the gender rainbow as something normalised and mainstream, just by presenting a narrative where that is the case.
And that fourth wall break at the end is actually pretty good.
"Well, that was fun! I hope they make more of these and I promise there's no way I'd get pregnant in the fourth one."