What’s not to love about a vampire apocalypse? This movie. The opening montage is thrilling & crackles with promise, but once Midnight Mass starts, the viewer is assaulted with bad acting, trope upon trope (priest turned vamp-see Vampires or Salem’s Lot instead) & the visual eye of teenagers trying to make a movie. For a moment, I thought that it was one of those movies marketed as a mainstream movie, but is a sneaky Christian evangelical movie or a Jesus infomercial. I got slightly excited because those movies are buoyed by authentic emotion & enthusiasm, but alas, this film is not. This film feels like it is trying to hit that note by making the parish church the focal point of the struggle between humanity & vampires, but in the end, it feels like painting by numbers. Joss Whedon, the atheist/humanist, did a better job in Buffy The Vampire Slayer when Faith in Buffy’s body confronted vamps in a church (chills when vamps claim that God won’t stop them then boom, slayer action, “Because it is wrong.”). Even the atheist converting felt perfunctory. Imagine my disappointment to discover that it is based on a short story by the author of The Keep! Hopefully the written word is more three-dimensional than this disappointing piece of celluloid. See Daybreakers instead.