Cravings...Daddy's Girl...Vampire Flick or the Welsh "Crush"

Lionsgate may have dropped the ball with their DVD release of the Welsh import "Daddy’s Girl" by renaming it "Cravings". Since it was originally released in 2006, the American distributor was probably just trying to capitalize on the belief that actress Jaime Winstone ("Donkey Punch") maybe the next great British actress. Horror DVD’s are probably the most rented and it being Lionsgate’s bread and butter, the renaming allow it to capture the largest audience. This proves to be misleading because Cravings is not so much thriller or horror feature than Alicia Silverstone’s The Crush. To its credit, Cravings does take the Electra complex to a new level of creepy.

Stephen (Richard Harrington) is a psychotherapist who is just six weeks removed from his wife’s suicide. As a welcome back present, his first new patient is Nina (Winstone), a girl who had slit her wrist on "accident." She claims to just be going through that cutting stage of adolescence, but Stephen believes that because she drinks her blood, there is a far more disturbing problem. As Stephen becomes closer to Nina’s mother (Louise Delamere), Nina begins to lash out at everyone who can offer her a taste of the crimson. Being too involved with the case, and still struggling with the grief of his wife’s death, Stephen must stop Nina’s behavior before it cost him his sanity and more.

Cravings is not about vampires in the traditional sense, but it chooses to wait till the one-hour mark before it disappoints the viewer who was hoping for paranormal action. There is nothing great about the film’s direction and the script had no clue on how to write the characters beyond Stephen and the ghost-whispering plumber. Because of this, the story is about Stephen losing his sanity, and the blood sucker with daddy issues is secondary.

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This path to lunacy may have been a great premise, but there are not that many things that he can go nuts over. The only poor performance (which may have just been written that way) is that of Delamere who does not know whether or not to be motherly, secretive, or devious, so there is only a suicide and a nutty teen threatening to push him over the edge. Somehow these do not seem to be grand challenge.

As for Winstone’s performance, she offers up her ability to be dynamic, but with no explanation of how she was ever at the low end of the evil spectrum, the script wasted her talent. She is a lovable psycho (okay this critic does not care much for poodles), and like the box art implies, she should have been the focus of the picture.

The American release of Daddy’s Girl is nothing but false advertising to try to promote a possible up-and-coming actress. It is written to poorly to be a great psychological thriller, and it is nothing close to being considered horror. If this lands on cable, it might be worth killing sometime or as background noise, but for those who have an itch for an entertaining DVD, this will not satisfy their cravings.