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Daybreakers

GIVE points to Aussie filmmakers Peter and Michael Spierig (the low-budget zombie comedy Undead) for tweaking the glutted vampire-movie market with this smart, subtly satiric Ozploitation thriller.

Daybreakers posits that in the year 2019, bloodsuckers are the majority after a global epidemic of vampirism. Fanged politicians debate on TV the fate of remaining humans, who are “farmed” for their blood (available at a reconfigured Starbucks near you). But the slick corporate boss Charles Bromley (a fiendishly droll Sam Neill) is content to stay the course of draining hapless humans of their blood in a sterile agri-giant facility, even as he employs scientists to come up with a viable blood substitute to feed the ever-hungrier masses.

Corporate haematologist and reluctant vamp Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) toils at that task until he’s recruited by the winsome surviving human Audrey (Claudia Karvan) to save humanity. The plan hinges on a classic car-driving, crossbow-wielding hunka-hunka burning macho who calls himself Elvis (Willem Dafoe).

The Blu-ray disc features an impressively all-encompassing making-of doc that follows the production from script rewrites to table reads to visual effects design. Evidently, no one in the cast actually likes horror films, but they all operate like genre pros, especially Neill, whose smugly arrogant villain suggests the main difference between a vampire and an avaricious corporate titan is only in the sharpness of their incisors.

The disc also has an early short film from 2000 by the Spierigs titled The Big Picture, wherein a woman sees her entire future set out before her on TV. The film’s punchline is, alas, already a cliché. ‘Ö’Ö’Ö1/2 out of five

Legion

THIS action-horror hybrid is kind of like a biblical variation of The Terminator.

Think of God as Skynet.

He attempts to do away with the world, but the single angel minion Michael (Paul Bettany) rebels at His plan to wipe out the Earth. And Michael has reason to take issue with The Big Guy’s methodology. Instead of sending a flood like the last time, God sends angels to possess weak-willed humans and turn them against their brothers.

Michael has determined that saving the life of a particular infant is mankind’s only hope. Unfortunately, that infant resides in the womb of a waitress named Charlie (Adrianne Pilacki) who lives and works in a decrepit truck stop oasis called — with delusional grandeur and a nod to John Milton — Paradise Falls.

Apparently, the infant is like the John Connor of this biblical Armageddon, so eventually the terminating angels are obliged to converge at this desolate outpost, first via a little old lady, then with an ice cream vendor, both of whom turn into creepy-looking monsters, much to the consternation of the truck stop’s salty owner (Dennis Quaid) and his good-hearted son Jeep (Lucas Black).

Michael arrives in an LAPD car with a trunk full of automatic weapons and helps the survivors make a stand against this rude intrusion of more otherworldly interlopers, who start to resemble workaday zombies when massed in sufficient numbers.

The movie might have a certain iconoclastic potency given that — excuse me — God is the bad guy. But director Scott Stewart doesn’t have the cojones to follow through on that effrontery. Bettany manfully attempts to ground this nonsense with a touch of dramatic gravitas, but in addition to fighting God’s legions, he is also fighting every horror-action cliché in the book to a sequel-ready conclusion. Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bettany won’t be back. ‘Ö’Ö

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca