It’s a bleeding drought which could lead to a feeding frenzy . . . . . .
The Spierig brothers follow up their enjoyable zombie debut feature, Undead, with an equally enjoyable, yet altogether different, vampire movie.
A plague has transformed most of the human race into vampires and those who are still fully human are few and far between. This means that blood is in critically short supply. Which is bad news for both humans AND vampires, who degenerate and mutate if they feed off their own kind. Ethan Hawke plays a haematologist working on a solution, Sam Neill is his boss and Willem Dafoe is a man with a crossbow who may just have a radical solution that nobody ever considered . . . . or wanted to consider.
Daybreakers is cool. Not in a flashy “let’s show you what we can do” way, more in a subtle “here’s a little touch that will just do enough to remind you that this is cool” way. The effects are all excellent, the storyline and the way things develop throughout the film makes for intelligent and fun viewing and the blood flows when it’s required.
All of the actors are just fine, alongside Hawke, Neill and Dafoe we get a range of people who I didn’t really recognise but who didn’t do a bad job either.
There is a little bit of humour here and there but, unlike Undead, the overall story is played out totally straight and the brothers show conviction in the execution of their own writing, drawing the viewer in and providing a believable world in which we get to see some pretty unbelievable stuff.
It’s not up there with Blade for coolness, it’s not up there with Cronos for intelligent twisting of the vampire mythos but it’s almost a nice blend of the two. With a hint of True Blood in there, which is no bad thing.
Rating: 
