Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Daybreakers Will Suck Out Your Brain Cells and Smear You With...

Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Daybreakers Will Suck Out Your Brain Cells and Smear You With Blood (And Not in a Good Way)

I like gore. It’s a good equalizer. At the end of the day, we all exist in the same corporeal bodies that can be sliced, hacked, carved, and eviscerated in any number of creative ways. (Oh, I’m sick, you say? Well you’ve been reading Tila Tequlia’s Twitter feed for the past week-so judge me not.) The only problem is that somewhere along the line between The Little Mermaid and Hostel, gore became the new black. Mainstream Hollywood now relies on it, mostly to compensate for garbage scripts and awful acting. “Sorry, no decent concepts or plot lines on the menu today, but we do have a grisly melange of shofar-shaped organs in a bloody reduction, sprinkled with bush-league dialogue.” Which is a shame, because good gore really shouldn’t be wasted on crap movies-it’s like having an Oscar-worthy performance in Cheaper By the Dozen 2.

So yeah, Daybreakers. It spackles on the gore, because without it, the awfulness of this movie can barely be restrained from seeping into your retinas and slurping out your myelin and gutting your soul and OH GOD MY EYES IT BURNS!!! Which is a shame, since the concept was interesting. What if everyone in modern society turned into a vampire? We’d all put blood in our Starbucks! And have sexy LED-lit eyes! And drive “day-proof” Cadillacs! Ohhand look we’d even have Ethan Hawke at his Reality Bites-palest (albeit a bit doughier around the edges) except he’d be even paler ‘cause HE’S a vampire too! And Sam Neill as the evil vampire corporate overlord! Isn’t this cool! Aaaand then it all tumbles off the precipice into a teeming pit of rampant idiocy.

Just how bad? Jesus, people. It’s like the Spierig brothers (who directed this putrescence-fest) challenged the Wachowski siblings to a Thunderdome cage match on 12 bottles of rat poison. Sam Neill is terrifying even in The Piano, and somehow you put him in a horror movie and manage to turn him into Pauly Shore? You DANGLE HIS SEVERED HEAD in front of the camera? Did his agent not object to this shit? And while we’ve gotten used to seeing the great Elias reduced to a dickless (literally) B-movie special, for God’s sake show some mercy-if you’re gonna make him say lines like “Being human in a world full of vampires is about as safe as barebacking a $5 whore,” then at least spare him the random-quoted Elvis lyrics. And the stovepipe jeans. Christ, this man did Shadow of the Vampire-show some fucking respect.

Oh lord and don’t get me started on the Soylent Green-esque “evil corporate overlords exploiting the last dredges of humanity” theme. Hey guys, get it?! Corporations are out to squeeze out every last drop of our blood! Haha check out our clever metaphor! We’re so much cleverer than the fucking Wachowskis! Oh, so you think it’s hackneyed and cliché? Okay then, here’s a human-vampire bloodbath in the lobby of a highrise! Top that bitches! What’s this, you say? The scene looks like an interpretive dance by Monty Python? Well fuck you, you Luddite.

But worst of all was the pseudo-spiritual faux-Confucian bullshit about the dangers of immortality. Which was insulting, not to mention nonsensical. How can an entire population be immortal? It eliminates birth and death, and thus the presence of life itself-it’s an existential paradox (though just think how much we’d save on healthcare costs-and forget about the whole obesity epidemic). As a post-cancer Steve Jobs said, “Death is the single best invention of life-without it, we think we have something to lose.” Somehow I doubt he meant to solicit thoughts on the topic from Troy Dyer.

Still, there wasn’t a single ounce of pulsating vampire lust. So at least there’s that.

Melissa Lafksy usually really likes horror movies.