Director – Adam Randall, Screenplay – Brent Dillon, Producers – Vincent Gatewood, Charlie Morrison & Ben Pugh, Photography – Eden Bolter, Music – Drum & Lace and Ian Hultquist, Visual Effects – Mr X. (Supervisor – David Jones), Special Effects Supervisor – Matt Kutcher, Production Design – Jeremy Reed. Production Company – 42/Unique Features.
Cast
Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (Benny Perez), Debby Ryan (Blaire), Lucy Fry (Zoe Moreau), Raul Castillo (Jay Perez), Alfie Allen (Victor), Marlene Forte (Abuela), Alexander Ludwig (Rocko), Sydney Sweeney (Eva), Megan Fox (Grace), Dane Rhodes (Officer Anderson), Ash Santos (Maria), Robert Larivierre (Professor), Hunter Burke (Daniel), Kevin Reid (Victim Max)
Plot
In Los Angeles, Benny Perez agrees to stand in as driver for his older brother Jay’s limo service while Jay is unavoidably called away that evening. Benny’s assignment requires him to escort two girls, Zoe and Blaire, around a series of parties before dawn. Soon into their trip, Benny makes the discovery that the girls are vampires and are killing and feasting wherever they stop. The girls were expecting Benny to be Jay who has a side-line as a vampire hunter, but accept him as cool. They are operating on behalf of Victor and are determined to kill their way through the established vampire hierarchy that runs the city before dawn.
Adam Randall is a British director who first emerged with the reality games film Level Up (2016) and went on to make the modest iBoy (2017) in which a teenager gains the ability to mentally access electronic data after having a cellphone impacted in his head, followed by the horror film I See You (2019). Night Teeth was Randall’s fourth film.
I didn’t have too many high expectations of Night Teeth before sitting down to watch, Nevertheless, the visuals as the film opens propel it into something quite extraordinary with amazing visions of vehicles cruising through the city with the streets, even the sides of entire buildings, all lit up in (digitally enhanced) artificial Day Glo colours everywhere we see. It is one of the most vibrant and visually colourful credits sequences I have seen in some time. Even after that, the film is filled with visually alive scenes with the entrances to parties strewn in red flowers and all manner of reflections off the limo windows, or the luscious costuming Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney are outfitted in.
(l to r) Vampire girls Debby Ryan and Lucy Fry on a limousine ride through L.A.
In actuality, Night Teeth is like a updated version of Modern Vampires (1998), a more comically minded vampire film that came with the amusing suggestion that vampires were the real power brokers behind the curtains of Los Angeles. Night Teeth conflates the idea onto an interestingly big canvas where the city is dominated by cantons of vampire influence, some of which are in subordinate positions to others. Amid this there are vampire rebels who have teamed up with the vampire hunters to help bring the vampire hierarchy down.
The main plot is driven by Alfie Allen and the two girls Lucy Fry and Debby Ryan who are in the process of creating a revolution and slaughtering their way through the clubs and parties of the vampire elite. This feels like a plot that should drive a whole tv series – it sort of did with tv’s Kindred: The Embraced (1996) and some aspects of True Blood (2008-14) – and it simply fails to get enough time when confined to a regular 107 minute film. Not to mention the writing in of Jorge Lendeborg Jr.’s young hero becomes a male equivalent of a Mary Sue who survives a situation where he in all rights he should have been toast and is constantly saved solely because the girls think he is cute.
