It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a vampire in possession of a modicum of sexuality must be in want of fucking. From Udo Kier’s turn as Dracula in Blood for Dracula to Chris Sarandon’s impeccable sweater choices in Fright Night to the ravenous love of all things Twilight, the vampire genre is...well, it’s horny. The only thing horror fans love more than vampires is imagining sex with them. And into this corner of vampire lore comes Red Snow, in which a wannabe vampire romance novelist finds a wounded vampire in her garage and is torn between wanting to save it, kill it or...

Well, you know.

Said vampire romance novelist is Olivia Romo (Dennice Cisneros), a writer who desperately wants to be published. But her novel Touched by a Vampire continues to be rejected from publishing houses across the country. Living in her dead mother’s cabin somewhere in Lake Tahoe, she has plans to spend Christmas alone until a bat smashes against her window and is left dazed and dying in the snow. After first deciding to leave it in the snow, her better side gives way and she puts the wounded animal in a shoe box, gives it a bottle cap’s worth of water and a small Band-Aid on its chest, then puts it in her garage.

The next day she goes to check on the poor creature only to discover the bat has turned into a very naked man who hisses at her with vampiric fangs and white, pupilless eyes.

Before she can react to this new information, a man named Julius King (Vernon Wells) knocks on her door and asks if she’s seen a trio of very dangerous people who’ve been in the area. He says he’s a private investigator from the mysterious Severon Group and shows her pictures of the people he’s looking for. Wouldn’t you know it, the one named Luke (Nico Bellamy) happens to be the naked man in her garage.

What follows is a vampire romance come to life, as Olivia finds herself stuck between helping Luke recover and deciding whether she can trust his washboard abs and his crooked smile...or if he just wants to eat her. Written and directed by Sean Nichols Lynch, Red Snow is a decidedly low budget affair that makes use of plastic fangs and white contact lens to establish the vampires. After the very intriguing setup, the script mostly flounders by focusing more on Olivia learning about the supernatural world and rather tepid romantic beginnings. The two bond over her clunky novel and in the biggest scene of seduction he gives her notes. Olivia and Luke do have chemistry and their subtle flirting sometimes hides the fact that their dialogue isn’t exciting or that the way the locations are lit feels cheap. It’s just unfortunate that the script introduces such an intriguing premise and then doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Eventually, the romance has to give way to action...and it also flounders here. These vampires just aren’t interesting. And while Luke bemoans Olivia’s Romanian setting in her novel Touched by a Vampire, Red Snow trades gothic romance for wooden characters who do things simply because it’s dictated by the script. At one point, Olivia calls the Severon Group and talks to a man named Simon (Edward Ewell) who provides arguably the best moments of the film. It’s a fantastic and witty conversation of a story that could have been. Unfortunately, while I enjoyed some parts and Dennice Cisneros gives a campy and entertaining performance, Red Snow is too messy and underdeveloped to uniformly recommend.