Daybreakers (2009)★★★★☆

As some kind of social/political allegory this movie is a bit overbearing and riding a slippery slope in an extreme direction. As a vampire movie, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Or at least refreshing in that these vampires don’t sparkle, they don’t go to high school, and they definitely don’t get tangled in love triangles with werewolves.

No, these are traditional vampires – stakes and sunlight kills them, and they need human blood or they’ll turn into mutated versions of themselves left with nothing but a primal need to feed. And there’s a lot of blood in this movie. Just not enough to sustain a vampire population much longer.

I could have done without the heavy handed clarity around whose side the filmmakers were on – if the contrast between the gloomy blue of the night world and the bright vibrancy of the daytime weren’t clear enough, the cure (and the twist) will be. But the world this movie takes place in is an interesting one even if its characters are pretty flat, and what this movie lacks in scares it makes up for in bloody action scenes.

Overall it’s reasonably entertaining, and it does get some credit for bringing the traditional vampire story back into the mainstream. No sparkling necessary.