Daybreakers

The first of this year's Midnight Madness films I've seen this year, "Daybreakers" is the second film by two Australian brothers.

The Spherig Brothers hold the distinction of having the very last film screened at the late, lamented Uptown 1 Theatre. I was at that screening and "Undead" was a perfect way to close the theatre -- a relentless rocknroll, zombie, alien abduction comedy thriller.

Six years later, "Daybreakers" shows that the brothers are in a bit of a transition. While the film had many of the more graphic elements of "Undead" (gallons of blood and entrails, monsters and thrills), there was clearly an interest to moving closer to the mainstream.

The film posits a world where almost the entire human population has "turned" into vampires. Society has adapted to a world confined to the night -- business hours have shifted 12 hours, cars come equipped with heavily tinted windows for daytime driving and blood is used as a flavouring for coffee. The imagining of this post-human world is quite clever and fully realized.

The remaining humans are being harvested for their blood supply. Unfortunately, the supply is dwindling and blood riots have begun to break out. Blood deprivation also has the additional effect of mutating vampires into ravenous beasts. While "vampire" society is civilized, the "sub-siders" look more like the Nosferatu style of vampire.

A haemotologist (Ethan Hawke) struggles to find a solution to the emerging crisis. He works in a mega-corporation in control of the blood supply, a corporation headed up by Sam Neill. Eventually, he connects with a ragtag group of human survivors, led by Willem Dafoe.

It's here that the tension between B-movie excess and the mainstream became apparent. There are scenes that would not be out of place in any number of trashy 70's sci-fi or horror films. But the presence of the A-list actors gave it a gravitas that it couldn't sustain. The end result felt that a film that tried to straddle the whole spectrum and landed somewhere in the mushy middle.

It reminded me a bit of Peter Jackson's work, from his early gore films like "Bad Taste" or "Meet the Feebles" to his later work on the "Lord of the Rings". The Spherigs seem to be following the same path, but at a much faster rate.
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