Daybreakers

I read somewhere that Daybreakers is the vampire movie that we had to have to counter all the Twilight romanticising of the genre.

And, happily, it isn't bad.

Set in 2019 in a world where vampires are the dominant species and the human population is down to 5 per cent. This means there is a blood shortage and the vamps are getting desperate.

Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) is the boss of the world blood suppliers and his team, led by Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), is working on finding a blood substitute.

Dalton is something of a vegetarian (in the Twilight sense) vampire in that he doesn't feed on human blood and he is sought out by a small group of humans looking for a sympathetic vampire to help their cause.

The group's leader Audrey (Claudia Karvan) takes Dalton to meet Lionel (Willem Defoe), a man who claims to be a 'cured' vampire.

So you can see where this is heading.

In the first few scenes it leaves you in no doubt that this is not one of the vampire stories we are fed these days. It's brutal, there's a lot of things jumping out. And then there are the underlings, vampires starved of blood that go feral.

I'd say about 95 per cent of this film is excellent as far as the genre is concerned but the writers did sell out a little toward the end with a bit of gratuitous gore. I enjoyed the largely Australian cast though it is disappointing that they had to put on American accents - the always excellent Claudia Karvan tended to struggle at times with that.

Overall it is well worth seeing, and while I'm only going 6.5 out of 10 I did enjoy it and hopefully it can signal a return to the classic depiction of vampires. But with two more Twilight films to come I highly doubt it.