(Photo courtesy of Google Images)

WARRENSBURG, Mo. – As we descend into the new decade and vampires replace zombies as the "it" thing, it is only normal that Hollywood would search every corner of the Earth to find them. Starting with "Twilight," moviegoers have been bombarded with vampires and the like over and over again, as Hollywood tries to milk its new cash-cow for all it's worth.

The good thing is that even though we are finding vampires in virtually every movie nowadays, that doesn't mean a good vampire movie doesn't slip through the cracks now and then.

"Cirque du Freak: The Vampire Assistant," could have been that movie. The movie begins with a lot to offer and then the writer and director simply dismissed its budding qualities—chopping the flower before it had a chance to blossum.

Based on the beloved Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan, "Cirque" tries to combine the first three books into one movie. The problem that arises is pretty straight-forward and expected—quite often, things simply don't make sense.

The movie revolves around Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia), whose life is less than exciting. Darren is a perfect student with no apparent discipline problems, his only personality trait seems to be that he loves spiders. He is the modern-day representation of children from the 1950s propaganda films, which portrayed them as innocent and perfect. Darren only has one struggle that keeps him from a completely clean record. That struggle is his best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson), a loud-mouthed, mischief-maker that is Darren's complete opposite.

When Darren and Steve attend a freak show known as the Cirque du Freak, they find themselves in a less- than-favorable situation. Darren's love for spiders causes him to steal a spider owned by a vampire known as Larten Crepsley (John C. Reily). Once the spider threatens Steve's life, Darren finds himself a half-vampire, who has to serve the arrogant Crepsley. During his service, he accidentally destroys a truce between two warring factions of vampires. Once this truce is broken, the cast finds themselves in the middle of a war. Unfortunately for Darren, Steve isn't on the same side.

The acting in this film is solid. Massoglia, who is the “new man on the block” in feature films, and Hutcherson, whose career has really cemented itself since Zathura, both perform beautifully as two best friends who were separated by circumstances. Reily really has stepped out of his box again, as he did in this year's animated hit "9," playing a tortured and poised character whose humor is not as wacky as he is used to. In addition to these three, there are other big names in the movie, including Salma Hayek and Orlando Jones. All members of the cast show promise in their performances.

The problem is that the director, Paul Weitz—whose brother normally accompanies him as in the landmark film "American Pie"—and Brian Helgeland—whose wonderful writing brought us "A Knight's Tale"—tried to do too much in one film.

The story is clunky at times and feels rushed. The characters, though witty and wonderful, don't really develop personalities. They jump from moment to moment at little notice, giving moviegoers little or no time to really understand and fully flesh out these characters. Each character feels as it is a cardboard cut-out and not really human. Both members of this team are not novices in the field and some may have come to expect more from them than this.

That being said, what "Cirque" does well, it does really well. The acting and the overall premise are, in a lot of ways, near perfect. It really is sad that more work wasn't done on the plot and characters, so that we could really get a sense of what is going on.

Overall, this movie seems to fall just below average. Maybe Weitz should have waited for his brother to be finished with "New Moon," due out later this year. although both Weitz brothers have vampire fever, one can only hope that Paul’s brother’s movie does a bit better. A promising but unsatisfying 2 out of 5.