I Love Valentine's Day!: Near Dark

Vampire stories nowadays are romanticized and doesn't take much of the real life angst of vampires.  Vampire "families" seem to easily work with each other without acknowledging conflicting personalities or differences in maturity.  In this low budget feature, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a young cowboy, one night picks up a pretty girl, Mae (Jenny Wright), whom he thinks he can charm into having sex. When she panics as the sun comes up, he promises to take her home, but only after a kiss. She obliges, but in addition bites his neck. Later as he begins to get sick, he is abducted by Mae's "family," some rogue vampires (Bill Paxton as the wild card Severen, Lance Henrickson as the leader Jesse) who are not too happy to find he is a new member and not just a meal.
Meanwhile, Caleb's father (Tim Thomerson) tries to find him, thinking he's out joyriding. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker.

Caleb seems to accept his fate quite readily. He doesn't seem to give much more thought to his family until they are reunited by coincidence and the film should have dealt more with this. The manner in which he is saved seemed a little too easy. The vampires are much more animalistic than romantic or tragic characters like in other films (at least, they're not tragic til the very end), very much an outlaw gang. Mae and her family don't dress in black, they're not pale and brooding, they look just like regular people. It's a fast moving film that takes place in one or two nights.

It started out with a new spin to the same old vampire plot, but overall it feels like there is so much more they can tell about who these people are and their histories. For instance, Jesse hints that he fought in the Civil War. Did he have a family he was fighting for? How about Severen? Was he always a bad boy?  How did they end up as vampires, how did they meet up?  Have other members to their family come and gone?  I think this needs a remake or miniseries.