I saw the trailer for this film and thought, "Oh hey a movie about vampires that actually looks...good!" I mean, come on. Corporate vampires. That's awesome. And to be honest, the movie did not completely let me down. It was a great movie. There were just a few flaws, particularly the ending. Which sucked. Which brings the movie down one full letter grade.
The first thing I have to emphasize is that there is blood. A lot of it. Well, of course there's going to be blood, it's a movie about vampires. Frankly, I think they overdid it just a tad. They are vampires, after all, and they do need to feed, especially given the circumstances in the movie. Apparently there is a blood shortage and as the vampires are depraved of blood they become more and more zombie-like. This, of course, naturally lends itself to the gruesome factor. But you can only have so many close-ups of people getting their limbs torn off. For God's sake, cut to the next scene!
If there's one thing I absolutely loved about this movie was how they made the vampires to be vampires. Not all this sparkle-in-the-sun-like-diamonds nonsense. When these vampires are exposed to sunlight, they burn. As they should. In fact, the movie introduces you to this fact in the first scene where a young girl vampire commits suicide by going outside and waiting for sun to come up. When it does, she bursts into flames and disintegrates. The vampires also don't reflect, appearing in mirrors as empty clothing. They have yellow eyes and noticeable fangs. There was no mention in the film about vampires having an aversion to garlic, but none of them were ever seen eating Italian food, so I'll let that one pass.
As I mentioned earlier, the biggest qualm I had with this movie was the ending. I'm not going to give it away because I don't want to spoil anything, but I doubt it would be any great loss even if I did. The ending was basically the same device they used for I Am Legend. It's as if they said, "We've got a good movie here, but how do we end it? I've got an idea, let's just stop it here and go for lunch." I mean, a bit of effort, please. This could have been really good if they'd just given it a satisfying ending.
Other than that, the visuals were good, the plot was fairly original, it had some great acting (especially on the part of Sam Neill as the head corporate vampire) and it had some really good shocking moments until they started to overdo it. That being said, I'd say it's worth seeing, but only if you're okay with a lot of gore and don't mind walking out of the theatre feeling less than satisfied.
Grade: B-
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