Bit, from director Brad Michael Elmore, is being marketed as

The story of Laurel, a teenage transgender girl who moves to LA and falls in with a gang of intersectional feminist vampires. Not knowing if they want to kill her, befriend her or turn her, Laurel learns to understand the love and dangers of her new and first group of friends

If this sounds too woke AF for you, then turn back now, there’s nothing for you here. Alas, even for those of us for whom feminism isn’t a naughty word, there isn’t much to get excited about, as a socially conscious concept does little to elevate this tepid slog of cliched characters and self-indulgent monologuing.

Laurel ( Nicole Maines ) has just graduated from high school and is off to make the trek from Oregon to LA to join her brother, Mark ( James Paxton ), for the summer. After hooking up with Izzy ( Zolee Griggs ) at a party, she finds herself at the mercy of her vampiric hunger but is saved at the last minute by Duke (Diana Hopper), who sees potential in her and decides she’s worthy of joining her gang of badass lesbian vampires so long as she can follow the rules: no mental manipulation of other vampires and no turning men.

This might as well be Duke’s movie. Laurel seems at first like your standard-issue sardonic maverick who goes to parties even though she’s so over them just to remind herself of how lame they are. But as soon as she makes it to LA she gets carried along from plot point to plot point without any defined sense of identity or motivation. Duke is a different story, a high-level edge lord that only comes up for air from her continuous stream of cigarettes to spout one-liners and heavily-orchestrated speeches about the patriarchy and how the oppression of women exonerates their lifestyle of indiscriminate murder. Her steadfast stoicism and blunted affect make for a less than charismatic ideologue which is unfortunate because she’s the only one here who seems to have any sense of purpose, certainly more so than Laurel who comes around about this whole life or murder rather quickly to fit in and seems only slightly perturbed that her new group of friends initially planned on killing her.

The plot largely revolves around Laurel getting used to her new vampire lifestyle which has some charming moments like when she learns to fly. Maines does a decent job of bringing her character to life given how underwritten she is. Perhaps more time spent wrestling with the morality of what she’s become could have given this film more of an emotional center. Instead, we’ve got half a dozen other plotlines that get just enough development to get in the way without providing any satisfying character development. These include a neglected friend Laurel left behind that we’re expected to care about after his 2 minutes on screen and a similar situation involving an ancient vampire that is being locked away whose ultimate reveal is lauded with fanfare that is never earned.

Horror can go to certain places and reveal certain truths that other genres struggle to convey through its license to showcase suffering and brutality in ways that might be perceived as gratuitous in other genres. A message is only as good as your ability to communicate it, however, and Bit feels like a cynical attempt to get audiences to overlook mediocre storytelling by leveraging the zeitgeist in a dance that has all the beats of punk rock social commentary but none of the soul.