From the very first page, Vamped suffused me with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I have all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Vamped is like watching an eighth season of Buffy. I could almost hear the soundtrack music in the background. The fashion-obsessed Cosmo Girl ‘tude of the heroine, the perfectly coifed and gowned Evil Villainess in designer spike heels, the creepy cannibal guy with the weird speech patterns, the geek who turns out to be amazingly cool... it’s all so strangely familiar.
Gina Covella wakes up in her coffin six feet underground and immediately deduces that she’s a vampire. (“Okay, there was only one way I knew to wake up dead - well, two, but I didn’t feel like a flesh-eating zombie.”) It’s never clear why this is a natural conclusion for Gina to form - most people would spend just a bit longer in denial. She claws her way to the surface (right through her coffin lid), where her trauma is instantly alleviated by the sight of bright red Macy’s shopping bags. Bobby, the geek who nibbled her neck at the senior prom and “infected” her so she awakens undead after a fatal car accident, has shown up to meet her in the cemetery. He’s brought new clothes, which was prescient of him, because Gina’s top concerns are her bedraggled appearance, the white eyelet lace dress she was buried in and the fact that she can’t see her reflection. When Bobby says that they need to stop at the mall “for a quick bite,” Gina insists on heading for the salon so she can turn her stylist.
The stylist gets away, and so do Gina and Bobby when a gang of thugs raiding the sporting goods store recognize them. The next day, the thugs capture Bobby and Gina and take them to the well-appointed luxury lair of vampire arch-villainess Mellisande. There we learn that Bobby’s unexplained death and turning has caught everyone by surprise, and he’s something special. A mysterious blue gem emits dazzling light when he’s near it. Gina is spared only because Bobby objects to her being harmed, and she ends up locked in a cell in the basement while Bobby stays with the big shots, and remains mostly off-screen.
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