“My Sucky Teen Romance” centers on a girl named Kate (Elaine Hurt) who decides ahead of attending Space-Con that she wants to spend her weekend checking out all the geeky stuff she loves, and finding a no-strings-attached convention weekend hook-up. Knowing that her local grocery store clerk, Paul (Patrick Delgado), will be attending the con, she chooses him as her target … not knowing that Paul was attacked just before the convention by a perennial teenage vampire from the 1950s named Vince (Devin Bonnee), and is now fighting the urge to drain the blood from the girl of his dreams. 

Hagins’ love of pop culture is well on display in “My Sucky Teen Romance,” and the film wastes no time parodying vampire tropes of both the classical horror and the sparkly romance variety. “You could sparkle or burst into flames,” a friend of Kate aptly declares after she’s been bitten.

For a movie filled with so many sarcastic takedowns of geek culture, there’s a sweetness embedded in the storytelling about the power of fandom, and the bond that exists between people brought together by a shared love of something the rest of the world thinks you’re “weird” for enjoying. As Kate turns more and more visibly into a vampire, her friends utilize their knowledge of vampire lore to develop a checklist of vampire symptoms. When Paul shows up at her convention hotel room to try and help her after accidentally turning her into a vampire, he realizes that she has things “under control” because her friends are using all of their vampire knowledge to keep her safe.