Oh, it’s good to be talking about this one, yes indeedy.  A vampire movie where the vampires don’t get all angsty and weepy and Ventrue their way around like LARPers given way too much money for a shooting budget?

A vampire movie where vampires don’t SPARKLE??

Oh, it’s almost too good to be true, o my readership.  And today we’re talking Daybreakers, which just burst onto theaters about an hour and a half ago.

Daybreakers gives us a strange future in which most of humanity is comprised of vampires.  The last few pure humans are kept as livestock in gigantic, Matrix-esque pens where their blood is continually drained away in a bid to feed the billions of vampires now on the earth.  By day, the world is a largely empty place, but at night, it comes, well, alive with movement.  But there’s a problem–the darned blood stock humans keep, you know, DYING and all as humans are wont to do, and that means the blood supply is running out.

And if you’re a vampire who goes too long without blood, you become a Subsider, a kind of ultravampire who’ll take any blood it can get, including vampire.  If there were ever Subsiders in number, the world would be doomed.

Thus a blood substitute needs to be found in short order…before the whole planet is reduced to a lifeless hulk by the Subsider plague.

I have to admit, I was a bit concerned when I saw this one as it was done by the Spherig Brothers, who brought us Undead (don’t worry, folks, I’ll cover that one for you next week.  You’ll want the background.).  Undead was awesome up until about the last ten, fifteen minutes or so when it suddenly switched into a completely different movie without bothering to tell anybody, and I was thus afraid that Daybreakers might have the same problem.

I was worried needlessly, of course, as Daybreakers managed to stay coherent rather nicely.  Daybreakers does something great in that it manages to keep the old traditions alive (staking is an automatic kill, sunlight is the end-all of vampires) and yet introducing them seamlessly into a modern setting (vampire coffee shops serving twenty percent human blood?  How cool is that? ).

It doesn’t hijack the lore for its own ends.  It doesn’t relentlessly pervert the canon.  It doesn’t show MASSIVE ignorance as to the generally accepted principles of vampire lore.  It takes what is, what should be, and inserts it carefully into a new setting, giving it lots of great fun.

Daybreakers is an action packed experience that will hold attention all the way through by regularly spacing out the action and adding bursts of exposition as needed.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, applauds this fresh dose of vampire joy and hands it an eight out of ten.  If you’re huge on vampire movies then you will absolutely LOVE this one, especially if you like them AUTHENTIC.