First off I have to say my review of this movie may be somewhat coloured by my adoration of the television series. Despite sharing a few superficial elements - a character called Buffy who slays vampires and who has a watcher - the two are quite distinctive (even if Joss Whedon penned them both).
"Buffy" here is very much played with a tongue-in-cheek. It's Clueless meets Dracula. Buffy and her cohorts are shallower than an evaporated puddle and Buffy can only learn to grow up when heaped with the responsibility of being the Chosen One, destined to slay vampires. The vampires in question are just people with white faces played up in quite a camp manner and bare little resemblance to the sharp, wise, smart vampires favored by both the TV series and other movies.
There's no acting of any note and the plot is wet-paper thin. The direction isn't memorable... so what stops the movie getting a 0 or a 1? The humour. The movie is played for laughs, taking a bit of a dig at pop culture and vampire lore. There's some great lines in it - particularly the "kill him A LOT!" line. Watch the coach at the basketball game for similar humour, and there is an unforgettable vampire staking towards the movie end that's very amusing.
The movie looks like it was shot on a shoe-string budget (adding to the camp tongue-in-cheek parody feel) and has none of the production values we'd see Whedon employ later on. What it does have is a sometimes very amusing line in black humour offset somewhat by an irritating need to follow the "Clueless" mould of teenagers (which was, admittedly, the trend at the time). It's not an awfully bad movie but it's not really all that good. In the end it's a 5.5/10 from me.
