Day Shift (2022)

Pretending to be a freelance pool cleaner, Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is actually a freelance vampire hunter, selling the teeth of the undead for profit (and no, the film never explains how this system actually works, or who is buying the stuff). He once was a union vampire hunter but was thrown out of the organization for irresponsible behaviour.

Because our hero is just that kind of a guy, he’s also separated from his family, not for lack of love but because he’s irresponsible and uses his work as an excuse for his absenteeism. Though I am not too sure the film actually understands this. Also, he never had the vampire talk with his wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and little daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax). Right now, Jocely threatens to move away unless Bud can come up with enough money for Paige’s school tuition and braces. Apparently, you only learn you have to pay five thousand dollars tuition a week before they come due.

Clearly, the only way to solve these problems is to get back into the vampire hunter’s union, which Bud manages with the help of mythical vampire hunter Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg, who is pretty awesome in this one). Of course, the union boss hates Bud and insists on desk jock Seth (Dave Franco) accompanying and watching him.

Which becomes particularly difficult because Bud has killed the actual daughter of budding master vampire Audrey (Karla Souza), who does not take well to this sort of thing.

From moment to moment, there’s fun to be had in the series of unthinkingly deployed clichés director J.J. Perry calls a movie. You can certainly see the extensive experience Perry has with stunt work, and get quite a few good to great action set pieces (which is more than you can say about the clearly much more costly The Gray Man which also comes to us via Netflix like this one), as if someone had thrown a bit of money to a direct to video action movie. Which at the very least keeps the film from ever becoming boring. In fact, once the triple action sequence climax starts, things become downright entertaining to watch, with well choreographed action filmed with vigour and without permanent cutting away.

All of which would make for a pretty awesome piece of horror comedy action cinema if not for a terrible script that can only ever think of anything as a set-up of a joke but doesn’t understand that your world building can only be a decent basis for jokes when it actually hangs together. That doesn’t mean it can’t be absurd – see something like the Men in Black films for how to do it right – but once your world only seems to be the set-up for jokes, those jokes should at the very least be pretty good. Day Shift believes a guy repeatedly pissing himself when he encounters vampires to be the epitome of humour, and so has its problems distracting from the fact that its world makes little sense, its characters are buddy cop movie clichés without any changes made to them and certainly no development, and that its plot can’t seem to focus for a second. How shoddy is the plotting? The film plays the old “the bad guy blackmailed this pretty woman to get close to our hero” card with a character Bud has met exactly one time before her “betrayal”.

Particularly painful is the late movie revelation that vampires in this world don’t actually have to murder people and still keep free will and their old personalities. Which, if you – unlike writers Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten – think about it for a second, means Bud is randomly murdering potentially innocent people for their teeth for a living.

Yet, there are still these very fun fights (including a cameo by house favourite Scott Adkins) keeping Day Shift generally watchable and entertaining.

Three Films Make A Post: Secluded getaway. Killer views.

The Rental (2020): Despite Sheila Vand, Alison Brie, Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White being no core cast to sneeze at, Dave Franco’s film about two couples going on a weekend vacation and crashing against most of them being pretty shitty people as well as someone really, really not liking them doesn’t do a lot for me. In part, it’s the too slow pacing of Franco’s and Joe Swanberg’s script, spending too much time on characters that simply aren’t terribly interesting, until it finally gets up to very rote thriller tropes realized competently but without verve.

The whole thriller/horror part certainly isn’t helped by the film never getting around to telling the audience why we’re supposed to care for these characters under threat anyway, so their fates aren’t exactly keeping one’s eyes open.

The Wave (2019): Gille Klabin’s semi-trippy film about a corporate lawyer on his way to become a total piece of human crap played by Justin Long learning a valuable – and rather final – lesson about the universe (apparently, it wants balance, maaaan) after not saying no to drugs, is surprisingly bland for a film containing a giant drug trip, time jumps and the stuff of “lost in the city” movies. The film’s surrealism simply doesn’t hit, the drug visions and shifts having a blandly banal air to them rather akin to the banality of its protagonist’s style of evil, really not breathing an air of the actual surreal as much as one of the try-hard surreal.

Not helping is the banality (yep, that word again) of the film’s philosophy, the sort of thing a film would need considerably more charm to sell than this one shows.

The Cleaning Lady (2018): Ending on another film that leaves me nonplussed, Jon Knautz’s horror movie about a woman with a “love addiction” problem making the classic movie mistake of befriending a member of the lower classes (it’s feeling rather Victorian around here) and landing in the hands of a violent psychopath doesn’t just annoy me with its implied politics. It makes the much bigger mistake of not being good enough as a thriller and a horror movie to not let me overlook its politics. Sure, it adds some mildly crass violence to at least give its villainess more of a background but not really even attempts to sell  her as an actual human being instead of a caricature of suffering turned evil.


When it comes to the shock and the suspense, the film’s just okay, with a couple of scenes that don’t quite work or simply lack the imagination for any of this to have much of an impact.

In short: Nerve (2016)

High school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) is the sensible – and decidedly too pliable - one in her small group of friends, hiding behind her extroverted friend Sydney (Emily Meade), ignoring the mute pining of her friend Tommy (Miles Heizer), and pining for some quarterback guy herself. She’d never actually say something, of course.

However, things change when her peers pressure Vee into playing a new, mysterious online game named Nerve. Nerve pays its players for filming themselves fulfilling increasingly difficult dares, while another part of its customer base pays to watch and vote and judge. Riding on an adrenaline high, driven on by all filmmakers’ love for the classic cliché of the inhibited person losing all measure of control once she steps out of her rut, and by the fact that the game throws her together with mysterious, brooding hottie Ian (Dave Franco), Vee keeps playing and playing, going from silly to problematic to outright dangerous and cruel dares, only realizing what she’s doing when it is perhaps already too late.

There have been quite a few films attempting to use and/or exploit contemporary social media youth culture (man, do I feel old writing this) for horror and thriller plots, but quite a few of these films fail because it is all too obvious – even to a guy like me born in the late 70s of the last century – that the filmmakers have little clue about how actual teens live their online lives (“Something about the Bookface, right, Jim?”), and therefore can’t but fail trying to comment on it. Going by their filmography, Nerve’s directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their screenwriter Jessica Sharzer are much closer to contemporary teen culture, and are consequently much better suited to evoke it as the basis for their film and comprehending what might be good or problematic about it.

This doesn’t mean that the film has any ambitions at being documentary or being “realistic”; it is more interested in grounding its thriller plot in something close to actual teen experience and then to exaggerate certain elements of it to comment on them. This grounding of course helps the film work as a thriller, too, building a reality whose boundaries can then be tested. Having said that, Nerve’s final act leaves any of that grounding business behind, solving the characters’ problems in ways that are certainly thematically appropriate but have nothing whatsoever to do with how computers are used, programming works, or what “open source” means. However, at this point, the film’s generally clever approach has earned it enough brownie points I feel it has also earned itself the right to leave the realm of plausibility behind.


Particularly since the film happens to be a solid teen thriller, with good acting, excellently paced escalation that usually also resonates thematically, beautiful, pretty damn eye-popping use of 2010s style neon colours and a slick but not vapid direction style. Now, Nerve’s finale is rather too on the nose for my taste (and would have utterly infuriated me by being so on the nose when I was a teenager) but I really think it is an honest and logical part of the film as a whole.