BEFORE: I've been inching closer to becoming a "freegan" of sorts over the last couple weeks. No, I have not been eating food found in the trash or that I got from dumpster diving behind a grocery store, I'm talking about living off of food that was served at events at the theater and then left behind by the event hosts. First there was a Broadway Cares benefit screening that had a pretty good food spread for the attendees (potential donors) and while I didn't eat anything AT the event (they threw out most of the food which had been sitting on tables in the lobby for a couple hours, for safety reasons) I did find a whole box of cooked cocktail shrimp in the fridge after, they had donated bottled water and whatever was in the fridge to the theater, which was easier than taking it with them. I had two solid meals at home that were just shrimp and cocktail sauce, which I love.
Then there was a "Best of 2026" screening as part of the After School Special week, featuring recent films made by student filmmakers and animators, and again, there was a catered reception in the lobby. While I didn't work that event, I was there the next day and the fridge was full again, with a sign saying "Staff - help yourself" and I don't need to be told twice. I just brought home a couple containers of cubed party cheeses and sliced salami, and I made little sandwiches on toast using the broiler of my oven, for maybe three days of lunch. Finally last night we hosted a book signing for drag king Murray Hill, and when we cleaned up the green room there was a whole box of pizza items left behind, since I knew I would be working the next night I saved it in the fridge for myself, and that was dinner tonight. Times are tough and I'm not making as money as I used to, so any night where I don't have to spend $10 or $12 on dinner and can eat for free, that's a big win.
Ethan Hawke carries over again from "Sinister". I'm starting to think maybe he's been in a few horror movies over the years...
THE PLOT: In the year 2019, a plague has transformed almost every human into vampires. Faced with a dwindling blood supply, a researcher works with a covert band of vamps on a way to save humankind.
AFTER: Well, this movie managed to make a bit of sense somewhere among all the nonsense. Obviously I waited too long to watch this movie, because it was made in 2009 and is set in the "future" world of 2019, that ship has kind of sailed now, the same sort of thing happened with "Strange Days" which was set at the turn of the millennium, but I watched it in 2024 or 2025. Whoopsie. But somebody in 2009 gazed forward ten years and imagined a world where the vampires not only existed, but they won, they spread their curse (or blessing) and flipped the script, this was a world with more vampires than humans. That's the nature of the thing, if each vampire makes another vampire every time they feed, and then THAT new vampire makes more vampires, and so on, and so on. It's like that old commercial where the woman liked her shampoo so much that she told two friends about it, and then THEY each told two friends, etc.
And because of human nature, nobody really saw the problem coming until it was much too late - or they saw the problem and nobody wanted to take steps to deal with it. This is the pattern for every natural resource we have - oil, gas, water, food - we keep using and using and we don't take steps to conserve or replace, it's "live for today" and maybe the next generation will be smarter and come up with a solution or some common sense. Nope, ain't gonna happen. So those vampires (having a human nature, essentially) just keep drinking more blood and more blood and denied the problem for so long that in the end there was no proper solution, things had gone way too far.
They COULD have set up some kind of system, perhaps, maybe some enterprising vampires would have established "blood banks" much like the ones we already had, only for a different reason. They could have allowed enough humans to live, signed some kind of treaty where they could work something out, we'll let a few million humans live and we won't turn them into vampires, provided they make monthly blood donations to the blood/food banks. Nope, let's just keep hunting them until there's only a tiny minority left, because "we hungee". It tracks. Instead they created a bunch of "blood farms" where a few humans are kept alive (barely) and are regularly drained to supply blood for the elite vamps. This kind of turns this whole film into a weird version of "The Matrix", except humans are being kept alive in tanks for their blood, and not for their...umm, why were humans being kept alive in tanks in "The Matrix" again?
As a result there are now some vampires who can't find fresh blood, or can't afford it, and this has caused some vampires to feed off of each other, or themselves, leading to mutations where they lose their mental faculties and turn more savage and bat-like. I'm guessing this is some kind of metaphor overall, because we see a vampire early on that is dressed like a homeless man, a street person, one of society's unhoused, and he's taken into custody to protect the other people in the city. Some screenwriter has obviously spent some time in New York...
The other metaphor that feels like it's in play here, feels like it has something to do with ICE, the situation we have now where our government has sent armed agents out into the streets of American cities, seeking out illegal immigrants who are (allegedly) a drain on our system and the cause of all our problems, even though technically we still have a free society that claims to be open and accepting of all, we need to round up the "problem" people and send them out of our country at the very least. That's kind of what happens here as the vampires in charge seek out the "subsiders", those vampires that have gone crazy and savage because of the lack of blood. The armed government soldiers police the streets, round up the savage and mindless vamps and drag them out into the sunlight, behind a truck, as a means of execution. There's just no way that the screenwriters could have predicted the rise of ICE and the U.S. government taking non-citizens into custody and making them disappear in a similar fashion.
There's no way that this film from 2009 could have predicted COVID, either, but it does feature a vampiric plague that was started by a vampire BAT infecting people in the year 2019. Did it come from a Wuham wet market? It's weird that this nonsensical horror film about the vampires winning managed to come SO CLOSE to predicting the pandemic, like if you just replace "vampirism" with "COVID virus" then it's spot on, right? Just me?
But looking at the overall narrative here, it's just all over the place. In most movies vampires are bad, no question, but then here they're running society, so that's...um, good? But they're farming blood from humans, so that's bad. And they've taken out most of the humans, also very bad BUT some vampires are working on a blood substitute, so, good? Just please tell me who I'm supposed to be rooting for here, the humans or the vampires, it's all very unclear.
Then we've got a guy who claims he used to be a vampire, and he is no longer. Is that good or bad? We think now that vampires can be cured, so that's good? But then as soon as they bring news of the cure to the corporate executives, it's not needed because somebody did make a blood substitute that works. Crap, can we all just get on the same page here? We won't NEED the blood substitute if we have a cure, or we don't need the cure because we have the blood substitute, WHICH IS IT? Jesus fuck, there's so much back and forth here.
The ending is just the worst, I couldn't even tell what happened and by that point I'd pretty much given up on caring about it. Edward and Cormac are vampires who have been cured, so are they human again, or something else? Frankie, Edward's brother, is a vampire soldier who then bites Cormac, the former vampire. But a cured human is somehow immune to vampire bites, and the cured human blood is somehow a cure in itself, so if a vampire drinks cured blood, he himself is then cured. So Frankie is now cured.
BUT Frankie is soon consumed by other soldiers (wait, I thought you said cured humans were immune from vampire bites, but now they are NOT?) and then Frankie is dead, but those soldiers that ate him are no longer vampires. Great, but then the guy who invented the blood substitute kills them right away - I mean GOD DAMN, what is the point of curing people of vampirism if you're just going to kill them all two minutes later? Same goes for Charles Bromley, the head of the company that provides the blood. He's tricked into biting Edward, who has been cured. So Charles then becomes cured, great, now that he's human again, maybe he'll see things differently. Nope, he's also immediately killed by vampire troops. I mean, I can see how this thing can spread to turn everybody human again but there has just GOT to be an easier way.
Even in an illogical vampire-run world, there needs to be just one series of logical narrative events leading to some kind of conclusion here. Sure, keep dreaming.
Directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig
Also starring Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Legend of Ochi"), Sam Neill (last seen in "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not"), Claudia Karvan, Michael Dorman (last seen in "Killer Elite"), Isabel Lucas (last seen in "Immortals"), Vince Colosimo (last seen in "Body of Lies"), Jay Lagai'aia, Harriet Minto-Day, Damien Garvey (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Sahaj Dumpleton, Tiffany Lamb, Carl Rush (last seen in "The Proposition"), Paul Sonkkila (last seen in "Like Minds"), Todd Levi (last seen in "Blacklight"), Wayne Smith, Mungo McKay, Emma Randall, Charlotte Wilson, John Gibson (last seen in "MacGruber"), Robyn Moore, Troy MacKinder (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), David Vallon (ditto), Christopher Kirby (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), Michael Ienna (last seen in "In the Cut"), Alex Revan (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Renai Caruso, Jane Wallace, Rohan Smith, Bryan Probets (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Glen Martin, Jason Chin, Konrad Whitten, Mark Finden
RATING: 3 out of 10 crossbows (the weapon of choice in the future, apparently)
No comments:
Post a Comment