Although Paul Weitz’s new film is subtitled The Vampire’s Assistant, the fact is that its protagonist doesn’t really do much to help out his undead boss. If anything, goony teen Darren (Chris Massoglia) only serves to make (after)life that much harder for one Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly), a long-suffering blood-sucker evading a rival vamp clan by lying low amongst the members of a travelling freak show.

So the title doesn’t make much sense, but that’s hardly the oddest thing about CDF: TVA, a film so geared towards a pre-existing constituency (the screenplay compresses the first three installments of Darren Shan’s popular young-adult novel series) that it completely alienates the uninitiated. The visual design suggests cut-rate Tim Burton, with what are already less-than-seamless special effects marred further by lazy editing. The plotting, meanwhile, is some seriously sub-Harry Potter shit, a frantic run-on series of dire prophecies, chunky expositions and clumsily literal adolescence-as-creature-feature metaphors. Weitz directs the proceedings with palpable disinterest; the only fun is trying to figure out whether Willem Dafoe’s cameo as one of Reilly’s pacifist-vampire colleagues is an homage to Vincent Price or to John Waters.