Vampires do make great screen villians as they're the sort of character an audience loves to hate. . Their need to survive by sacrificing the life of another, draining their body of blood, rather ironically, seems more than justifiable to the very viewers who themselves would be nothing more than the next course on a vampire's menu (assuming vampires existed in the "real" world).
Their level of commitment to being a vampire is also often quite inspiring in a twisted way, as they do so with such passion. They're sexual and seductive ways are a very attractive quality and I'm sure many fans of vampire lore have often been somewhat curious as to what it really is like being a vampire.

Anne Rice added a new spin to the vampire mythology and has created a whole new world of such types of vampires. Spawning over a long running series of novels, Chronicles of a Vampire. To date, her novels have been transformed into 2 movies. The first was the highly successful and initially controversial Interview with the Vampire (controversial purely for the casting of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, which Anne Rice initially very publicly objected to the casting of.... she later ate her words big time :).
The second filmic adaptation, Queen of the Damned takes a few liberties with the subsequent novels by combining elements from, Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned.

Interview & Damned as such drastically different movie, stylistically speaking, that you'd be forgiven for not linking the two together. Interview is far more grandeur in it's storytelling and takes it's time to draw you in to it's narrative, whereas Damned is [by comparison] a 90minute vampire rock video.

Where Interview was the story from the Point of View of  Louis (turned by Lestat), Damned is Lestat's (Stuart Townsend) modern day story of living in the new Millennium. Sick of hiding who he really is (and also because he's a show pony), Lestat comes out to the world via a rock band, which he has made himself lead singer of. This of course pisses the rest of the Vamping world off as it's exposed, what was up until now, mythology.

Like Interview, Damned flashes back and forth between present day and yesteryear. As the title of the film suggests we get a glimpse into the life (more accurately the living death) of the very first vampire, Akasha (Aaliya). It turns out that Lestat is obsessed with Akasha and her power as a vampire, and he's wanting to wake her from her "stony" sleep.

Though Damned doesn't successfully capture the vampire ways of Interview it's none the less a nice effort, even if it's it comes across as being heavily compressed, narratively speaking.

Of note mostly to us region 4 DVD'ers Damned was shot in and around Melbourne, and as such, is riddled with plenty of Aussie faces in both minor and major roles.

VIDEO
Damned sports an exceptionally pristine looking 2.35:1 anamorphic Widescreen Transfer. It's not quite perfect, but comes pretty close, offering a very stable image with a very nature level of detail and sharpness. Colour saturation is uniformly good with a push more to a cooler blue look, and even though black level is a fraction low, it still offers pretty damn good shadow detail(partially due to such a clean and grain free solid image)
MPEG artifacting is at worst attributed only to the background and so will be of little annoyance.

Spread over 2 layers of an RSDL DVD, the layer change occurs during chapter 13 at the 47:00 minute mark, offering a relatively unobtrussive layer change only moments after a line of dialogue from Lestat.

AUDIO
As mentioned above compared to Interview, Damned is essentially a 90 minute rock vampire video and the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track makes this assessment pretty clear. It's a full throttle mix with hard edged music, and sharp biting sound effects. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout with little to no sign of sync problems. The soundstage on a whole really doesn't let up, with the both a constant assault of music and very aggressive sound effects. Surround usage is either stop, or flat out. Naturally, the LFE track will give your subby a hard work out. Nice!

EXTRAS
Complimenting the film is quite a good collection of extras.(all main extras are nicely subtitled as well)