Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant Review

Like the unhappily undead kid at its heart, Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is a film with a chronic identity crisis and no clear idea where it's headed. This dizzyingly busy adaptation of the books by Irish writer Darren Shan - who, confusingly, has named the series' hero after himself - is so intent on pitching itself as the opening instalment in a future franchise that it fails to stake out any territory of its own. It's certainly a coup for John C Reilly, who's been roaming around for years in search of something he could sink his teeth into. As the 200-year-old vampire Larten Crepsley he gets one of his tastier recent gigs, but the rest of the production is a bewilderingly unfocussed mash-up of teen romance, Harry Potter-esque fantasy, coming-of-age drama and be-true-to-yourself message-mongering which drifts in several directions at once without arriving anywhere new.

Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) is the goody-goody school kid who, with his reckless buddy Steve (Josh Hutcherson), picks up a ticket to the mysterious Cirque Du Freak - a travelling carny populated by midgets, a snake boy, a man with two bellies and Rebecca the monkey girl (Rebecca Carlson). Because Darren is obsessed with spiders (in a rare instance of restraint we're never told why - he just is) he steals ringmaster Crepsley's poisonous pet arachnid Octa who gives Steve a lethal bite. In return for the antidote, Crepsley recruits Darren as his assistant, taking him away from his family and turning him into a vampire.

There's enough in that first half-hour to power a couple of episodes of something not as good as 'Being Human' or a junior 'True Blood'. But wait, we haven't even got to the proper story yet, which involves the oily Mr Tiny (Michael Cerveris) as he attempts to provoke a war between the vampires like Darren and Crepsley who don't kill people, and the Vampanzees, who do. And out of that, Russian doll-like, emerges yet another sub-plot - this time about the lethal rivalry between Darren and Steve as they take opposite sides in the war of the undead. There's so much story kicking around that Salma Hayek's bearded lady can only summarise it with a series of random nouns: "Death. Redemption. Despair." You wonder if these represent the unticked boxes on the test screening questionnaire.