Nerdly » Romford Film Festival 2025: ‘Razor Blade Smile’ (4k Restoration) Review

06th Jun2025

Romford Film Festival 2025: ‘Razor Blade Smile’ (4k Restoration) Review

by Guest

Review by Jack Oxford

Stars: Eileen Daly, Christopher Adamson, Jonathan Coote, Kevin Howarth, David Warbeck, Heidi James, Isabel Brook, Louisa Moore | Written and Directed by Jake West

What makes a B-movie a B-movie? Is the label an insult, or something more neutral?

Jake West’s Razor Blade Smile thoroughly embraces its status as a B-movie, especially given its status as the winner of the inaugural B-Movie Film Festival in numerous categories. Though I haven’t seen the other contenders (they don’t seem to have the same cult following as Razor Blade Smile), I can see why it would stand out in a sea of pretenders.

Razor Blade Smile is led by scream queen Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver, and guess what? She’s a vampire. Not actually my first guess, she certainly could have been a witch with a name like that, but let’s not get sidetracked. Eileen fully understands the movie she is in, and embraces every second of it, delivering the cheesiest of lines without a tremble in her tone or twitch at her mouth to betray her. She is acrobatic, Kill Bill-esque with a monochromatic bodysuit and katana (where the hell did she get that from, or learn how to use it?) that she employs to seduce and slice, respectively.

I won’t spend much time talking about the plot, to be honest, I’m not sure it really matters. Lilith is a vampire and an assassin, named as the Angel of Death to the police investigating her. A police detective (Jonathan Coote) who fancies himself as a bit of a Van Helsing pursues her. Except he’s part of a cult that has ties to the Illuminati, the same as many of her victims? Everything is linked, it seems. Lurking in the background is her ex-lover, another vampire, portrayed by Christopher Adamson of Pirates of the Caribbean fame.

All of this is just an excuse for Lilith to go around cutting up and sleeping with various people, which is fair enough. There are several quite explicit love scenes – you’d probably feel betrayed without them in a movie like this – that display the classic conceit of vampirism in association with lust that we see time and time again in vampire fiction, from the CW’s Vampire Diaries to the recent Nosferatu remake. Lilith uses people for sex, then their blood. She feels no guilt, enjoying her monstrous nature.

Visually, Razor Blade Smile is a mixed bag. The CGI is not great – it’d be quite jarring if it had been excellent, in fairness – but the camerawork is competent, fully deserving of its Best Cinematography win at the B-Movie Film Festival. Lilith’s kills are a delight to watch, beautiful with contrast between her pale skin and excessive blood. There are a few scenes set in a nightclub as well, where she has befriended some vampire enthusiasts, who are unaware of her true nature. A photographer shoots Lilith and her friends here, and we are shown a selection of these on-screen, showing off the exceptional costuming. Lilith then proceeds to kill and feast on one of these friends, though not before a tryst of course.

So, how do you even score a movie like Razor Blade Smile? It fills a specific purpose, and is unapologetically a B-movie, so why would I score it in comparison to much higher budget, modern movies like Nosferatu, or even something like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners? Those are still vampire movies, sure, but they couldn’t be any more different to each other.

I try to be objective when scoring, assessing individual elements of a work and seeing how they cohesively marry up. But a movie like Razor Blade Smile has context and intention that is impossible to ignore, and it would be wrong to go all Death of the Author on it. For example, for some movies, Eileen’s performance as Lilith would be ridiculous, over-the-top, campy. But it’s purposeful, and it would have been strange if she’d gone all Cate Blanchett. As such, my score purely reflects my enjoyment of this film, embracing its B-movie nature in full.