Daybreakers

In the world of Daybreakers, vampirism has infected humanity and, after a brief period of civil war, society has resumed its normal course, with a couple of key differences. This is a night-time culture, and the streets lie empty in daylight. The few humans that remain are farmed for blood by corporations like Bromley Marks, headed up by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) and for whom Edward (Ethan Hawke) works as a research haematologist. Vampire scientists are searching desperately for a substitute for human blood, as supplies are dwindling and without it vampires revert to a violent, brainless, batlike form.

The basics of animal husbandry seem to have eluded these demons: why not simply breed the humans? Unlike vampire stories from Dracula to New Moon, where bloodsucking is a stand-in for sex, fornication doesn't enter into the equation here. That's because in Daybreakers the red stuff doesn't symbolise lust per se, but rather humanity's insatiable lust for oil. That's right: it's a B-movie with a message - Who Killed the Electric Car? in plastic teeth and a cape. All it lacks is an undead Michael Moore sinking his fangs into big oil.

Edward is a vampire with a conscience who dislikes drinking human blood; in the real world, he'd drive a Prius and keep a compost heap. After meeting a fugitive human in a traffic accident (Claudia Karvan), Ed's introduced to a secret most vampires don't know: that their condition has a cure. That cure involves a grizzled ex-vampire called Elvis (Willem Dafoe), who serves the kind of purpose a Vietnam veteran would play in a straight action film, and therefore gets the kind of cheesy dialogue reserved for Men Who've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe. ("Living as a human in a world of vampires," he tells Hawke, "is as dangerous as barebacking with a $5 whore." Clunk.)

The Spierig Brothers are the scrappy Brisbane twins who made the 2003 zombie thriller Undead literally in their bedroom, creating the CGI effects on home computers that would take all night to process a single frame. Made in Queensland but set in America, their follow-up is a fun little B-movie with a few nice shocks and enough gore and mayhem to guarantee it a long video-store shelf life. Whether it can pass muster in cinemas remains to be seen. The special effects look cheap; and while the premise, with its "we're drinking the blood of the earth!" subtext is interesting, the characters just aren't.

That said, I for one am happy to see that Daybreakers is partly funded by the former Film Finance Corporation. It's nice to think the funding bodies are paying attention to the kind of movies large numbers of people are actually going to see. Nick Dent

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