The Fourth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #2: Daybreakers

With 2009's Daybreakers, we have a perfect example of an R-rated horror movie that's not the least bit scary.  It's 2019 and 95% of the world's population has been turned to vampires.  The vamps have kept it business as usual - global economics, social lives, school - life's schedule just shifting out of daylight hours since the UV causes them to burst into flames.  The problem:  with just 5% still human, there's not enough blood to sustain the population.  As blood rationing is instituted across the globe, and the impoverished classes slowly starve and devolve into feral, nightmarish creatures, reluctant vampire scientist Ethan Hawke works in a fancy lab for a high tech blood supply company, trying to synthesize an artificial blood substitute.  Ethan (not his character's name but who cares, really?) is sympathetic to the plight of the nearly-extinct humans race and becomes involved with a band of them, led by former vampire Willem Dafoe.  In addition to saving what few humans they can from the vampires' blood farms, the rebels want to get word of the cure out there.  It turns out that there are two cures: (1) burn the vampire out of the person with sunlight (extinguishing the flames before the inflicted turns into a crispy critter) and (2) get a vampire to drink a cured vampire's blood, which reverses the affliction.

Were you bored reading that?  Because I was bored writing it and I was bored watching it too.  Daybreakers is just boring.  There is no suspense whatsoever, no tension to the story.  The big bad is a businessman, ferchrissakes, played by a scenery-chewing Sam Neill.  Ethan Hawke, seemingly unaging in real life, sulks through the movie with nary an expression change.  The film gets its R rating from a few F-bombs and some squishy, bloody vampire violence, none of which is any worse than anything seen on True Blood (which at least is entertaining).  On the plus side, Daybreakers is short enough and I can get through almost anything if it's only 98 minutes long.

Next up (I think): The Convent