|
Lionel “Elvis” Cormac (Willem Dafoe) and vampire Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) get rudely interrupted in the blackly comic thriller “Daybreakers.” |
Finally, someone has created a bloody, blackly comic horror film that deserves to be in the company of Stuart Gordon’s Grand Guignol masterpiece “The Re-Animator” and Sam Raimi’s goo-pumped demonic frightfest “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.”
It’s called “Daybreakers,” and it comes from Australian twins who call themselves the Spierig Brothers. They’ve made only one other movie, a 2003 zombie tale, “Undead.”
With “Daybreakers,” the Spierigs — Peter and Michael — have taken a low-budget production and twisted it into a fun and frenetic nail-biter, an apocalyptic tale of greed and survival in which vampires are as driven by quarterly reports as the humans used to be.
In 2019, a mutated virus from a single bat (you have to look carefully at the background TV screens to pick up some of the exposition) has turned most of humanity into vampires with large colored contact lenses. They carry on with their old human routines, except that they can only go out at night. The sun will fry them into blackened ash.
For 10 years, the growing vampire demographic has devoured most of the human population. Vampire soldiers track down the remaining humans, most of whom wind up naked in a hideous warehouse, strapped to machines that pump out their blood to be sold by the Bromsley Marks Corporation, run by a real corporate bloodsucker, Charles Bromsley (played with joyful nastiness by Sam Neill). (Read more…)