A wry Megan Fox cameo is just one pleasure in the Netflix vampire movie Night Teeth
A good cast and some killer design distinguish this After Hours for the bloodsucker set
Film Reviews Netflix
Looking for a leg up in the world, aspiring producer and artist Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) takes over his older brother Jay’s chauffeur gig for the evening. It makes sense, as Jay (Raúl Castillo) has some heavy shit he’s dealing with and not talking about. So Benny finds himself tending to the social needs of party girls Zoe (Lucy Fry, with Cara Delevingne eyebrows and a mid-’90s UK shit-kicker vibe) and Blaire (Debby Ryan, with good girl undertones and a wry sense of humor). They’ve got a series of hot events to hit all over Los Angeles. Catch is, they have to do it all by sunrise. One guess as to why.
Can Benny, implicated in the longstanding conflict between human and bloodsucker, keep the balance of Los Angeles in place while also fulfilling his professional duties? The backstory of this ancient rivalry, as well as the truce that enables L.A. to proceed as an organized nexus of criminal activity, is told as art on the hoods of cars and on the sides of vans in the film’s majestic opening sequence. It’s an inventive choice that sets up a vibe that Adam Randall’s Night Teeth mostly maintains: epic vampire-fiction lore melded with the street art of humanity in the now. Add in the structure of a one-crazy-night picaresque like After Hours or Quick Change, and the mechanics of mob war art (encompassing smartphone video games and Johnnie To epics), and you’ve got the basics of this enjoyable but not quite exceptional genre hybrid.
The cast is generally charming, even if some of the more prominent names get just one superbly art-directed scene before we’re back to the GPS and on to the next locale. These cameoing guest stars make the most of their screen time: Alexander Ludwig’s pansexual surfer vamp Rocko, who’s like some undead variation on a Steve Zahn or Wyatt Russell type, deserves his own spinoff. And Megan Fox makes an impression in lingerie and a jeweled shawl, adopting the perfect jaded tone as though she were auditioning for the role of Selene Gallio whenever the MCU decides to bring in the X-Men. These pop-up mid-bosses are way more fun than the rest of the film, though we also get Alfie Allen as the vampire Big Bad, another example of the pasty parasitism that’s become a global go-to routine for Game Of Thrones alumni.
Night Teeth has a lush visual sensibility, finding aspects of Los Angeles we haven’t seen countless times in movies and television. The party mansion of Gio (Mad Men’s Bryan Batt), one of the vamp crime bosses, is Caligula gilt surrounded by a field of luminescent red flowers—an organic swath of LEDs that sticks in the back of the viewer’s mind, in its way as reassuring as the home Benny, Jay, and their grandmother share. And first-time screenwriter Brent Dillon’s script excels at the little details of social structure, human and vampire, that distinguish Night Teeth from other politically minded genre picks.
At heart, this is a West Coast companion to last year’s similarly enjoyable Vampires Vs. The Bronx, though that film had more of a specific political perspective—as well as a more diverse coalition of neighborhood folk fighting off the unholy menace. (We’re never let in on why exactly it’s only the Latinx community that holds Angeleno vampires at bay.) It’s clear where Night Teeth is headed from fairly early on, and there aren’t a lot of surprises along the way. But the film fulfills its obligations with style, even if it never matches the ambitious flourish of its opening sequence.
25 Comments
“Night teeth”.
“What my grandma says to her dentures before going to bed.”
“HEY NOW!”
oof.
I still can’t believe how much fun this movie looks like.
Has anyone noticed that they aren’t showing the letter grades on the homepage anymore?
You mean like this?
On my browser (Edge, because I’m on my dinner break at work) the letter grade appears briefly before the image comes in, then disappears. The letter grades haven’t been showing on the homepage for a few days, now. It might be different of Chrome, I’ll have a look later.
Nah, they disappear like that in Chrome too.
Edge here, too (it seems to handle Kinja’s clusterfuckery better than other browsers). No disappearing grades on my end.I just checked the front page on Chrome & Firefox – again, no issues.
Heaven knows if this screenshot will work with Kinja as it is, but this is what mine looks like, no grades:
But that’s not the homepage (per the OP). If I click over to the film section, it appears like your screen shot, but scrolling down to the Reviews section, all the thumbnails display grades.
Fair enough, I was just choosing a page with a concentration of reviews.The homepage:
Actually, I do get them if I scroll down to the Reviews section of the film page, but they’re nowhere to be seen anywhere on the homepage.I don’t mind really, I’m not so fussed about the grade compared to the content of a review, but I was just showing SOLID MATTIC that it wasn’t just their browser.
Just out of curiosity . . . do vampires need to brush?
Likely not, but this is going by WWDITS latest episode. You can pull fangs out and they’ll regrow by the next night.Then again, maybe that only pertain to fangs.
Yes, but not their teeth!
Why are the AV Club reviewers consistently so wrong? Is it done on purpose to get attention, or do you guys just have shitty taste?https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/night_teeth
I am weed.
~workin on my night teeth~
“I can hear you singing your night teeth song, Lemon.”
One-crazy-night picaresques are exactly my jam, so I’m looking forward to this now, having previously never heard of it.
One of the short reviews I saw a few weeks back compared it to Collateral, which immediately piqued my interest up from zero to “why not toss it on on a lazy Friday night after a shitty workweek” because I fucking love Collateral.
It’s a sliding scale of how lazy the Friday will be.
it’s weird that the only reason why I heard of this movie was “megan fox is back doing horror!” and she’s in it for five minutes.
If that, even.