I have a very open mind and heart when it comes to vampires. My love for them is deep and eternal enough that I just couldn’t resist giving Valemont a chance to improve in the final episode. There had to be a chance they could finally get it right, fix the horrific plot imbalances, and come through to snatch victory with a capital V for Valemont.
Unfortunately not.
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| Christian Taylor (middle) the writer of Valemont with the cast – the man to blame for this horror. Dillon Casey (half-naked) is the best thing about it! |
The final episode of Valemont thankfully didn’t end with the death of everyone. Sebastian van Cleer, vampire, survives a sword through the chest (points for keeping the vampire hero alive), the bad guy dies (although since Sebastian survives a worse sword wound, his death is debatable — points deducted for this oversight), and the poorly named Gabriel (points also deducted for using such a cliche name) also survives… not sure what he is. Human I think.
The writing on Valemont hasn’t improved. It’s poor, the plot is so weak that it hurts, and there’s still a shocking lack of emotion. I’m still trying to get over the previous few episodes’ complete disregard for relationship building. Sophie, the heroine, goes from kinda liking Sebastian, to using him to get his key to the Panthera house, to hating him and wanting nothing to do with him… and then… once she too becomes a vampire and is told that pure bloods like her can’t get it on / can’t marry another pure blood like Sebastian, she has a massive weepy tizzy about it in his face, asking him why he never told her that they couldn’t be together. I was like – WTF? – since she had shown NO true emotional interest in the guy and suddenly she was acting as though she was madly in love with him and devastated. Honestly, you’ve got to at least reveal some emotion / her feelings in previous scenes to back up such a bombshell otherwise it just doesn’t work.
The camera work and shoddy sound didn’t improve in this episode. Soft focus was met with blur and sound that fluctuated in volume so badly I had to ride the volume on the remote through the entire episode. It was painful to watch and gave me no reason to connect to it at all. Valemont screams of wannabe and fails dismally to capture this audience and make me give a damn about the characters. The sad thing is, I’m left with the feeling that it could have been so much more. If the writing had been refined, or written by someone else perhaps, or the writer had done his research better about the field he was entering into rather than rushing to leap on the bandwagon, it could have been great. I’m bitterly disappointed and I’m desperately hoping that MTV let this one die a peaceful death and don’t ressurect it for a second series. It’s not even worth it to see more of Dillon Casey!
Although, when Sebastian is supposedly killed, the heroine Sophie has a short weepy moment and then after the grand finale, she doesn’t seem to give a monkey that she’s standing in the same room as his dead body, and that of her brother. If she cared about the vampire hottie, surely she would have returned to his side post-fight? Bitch.
If they do insist on making a second series of Valemont, MTV needs to get a new writer, one that doesn’t come across as though it’s the first thing he’s ever written and didn’t bother to revise it before turning it into a trashy series. I’m available if you want a vampire series with bite and emotion, and a plot that makes sense… although I would have to fire your camera and sound crew.
