The vampire genre is a lot like a vampire: It has lived for hundreds of years, and every time you think it’s about to die off it gets an infusion of new blood. Since the logistics of neck-biting and blood-sucking are no longer incendiary, a vampire movie, novel, or TV series that strikes a chord will tend to be infused with a tasty metaphor, one that reaches beyond the “erotic” obvious. In the mid-’70s, when the genre had come to seem musty, Stephen King’s “‘Salem’s Lot” (1975) and Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire” (1976) revived it by plugging the gothic tropes of old horror movies into the eccentric nooks and crannies of the contemporary world. “The Lost Boys” converted vampirism into ’80s youth-movie hipsterism, “True Blood” tapped the progressive side of vampires, and the “Twilight” books and blockbuster movies made the vampire into an expression of alienated teen-romantic outsider-ness. (Jim Jarmusch’s slow-drip “Only Lovers Left Alive” demonstrated, with a druggy wink, that sitting through a vampire movie could make you feel like you’d lived as long as a vampire.)
“Night Teeth,” a Netflix vampire thriller set in Los Angeles, would like, in some halfhearted way, to give a spin to the genre. The central character, Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), is a gawky cute college kid and aspiring EDM composer who, filling in for his brother as a chauffeur, spends one long night driving around a pair of vampire vixens who come on as lethally jaded dolled-up party-hoppers. The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it.
Night Teeth doesn’t shy away from gore, but also doesn’t bare its fangs. There are no standout special effects, most of the deaths are fairly downplayed compared with the majority of action horror films. When vampires burn, they implode rather than explode, which makes it less showy, but more effective. The settings, however, are nicely stylized. Director Randall’s Los Angeles is a world of neon nightlife, velvet ropes, and foreboding underground parking lots. It is a visually engaging landscape.
Night Teeth has one advantage over some of Netflix’s other young-aiming horror offerings, like the vampire street fight Vampires vs. The Bronx. The players are more mature here, and more can be teased. Why bother producing a vampire piece without erotic danger? The two leads are alluring, though they reserve this for only the most appropriate situations. Also, besides Rocco’s creepy psychic energy readings, the vampires don’t seem to have any gifts besides speed and strength. This is a disappointment, and is obvious in lost opportunities.
There are strenuously busy action scenes. There are scenes that nudge the plot along without connecting to anything else. And there’s the honestly creepy image of a row of glass booths in a basement where Victor keeps humans chained and unconscious, so they can be harvested for blood cocktails. It’s all served up, with glum sensation, for our entertainment, yet none of it invites our investment. The daylight still melts these vampires, but by the end of “Night Teeth” it’s the audience that feels melted down.
