SamNeill

Debate among my friends is that the vampire mine has been stripped. They've done it all. Nothing else can be said in the matter, unless you're making something about vampires that aren't really vampires. The exploration of the nosferatu is one of the oldest in film history, of course, and the approaches to the subject matter are rich and varied. There are the ancient and secret empires of Underworld, the disturbed loners like Martin, and the Oklahoma trash clan of Near Dark. More often than not, though, it's some tired retread of Dracula or a semi-congealed mess that's been shunted straight to DVD. But now, after the cult hit of Undead, the Spierig brothers kicked a little bit of life into that torpid corpse.

In 2019, vampires rule the earth. Blood supplies across the globe have been exhausted, threatening to cast the austere, shadowy world into chaos. What few humans are left are precious commodities, of course, as Ethan Hawke and his crew at Bromley Marks have yet to successfully synthesize a blood substitute. His boss Bromley, played with the serpentine iciness of Sam Neill, cracks the corporate whip, pushing the team for his own greedy purposes. Meanwhile, the world is quickly sliding into decline. The effects of blood-deprivation aren't just starvation. It twists the otherwise human-like vamps into nasty, feral things - crazed creatures with veined wings and mottled skin. As more and more of the general population tumble down the evolutionary ladder, they go 'full Morlock' and migrate to the sewers. Hawke, with his brood dial turned all the way up to '10', wants to prevent the extinction of the humans. He finds his chance to help when he discovers a small band of living rebels, putting himself at odds with his company, his brother, and the entire vampire race.

Daybreakers is gearing up for its January 8 release and Lionsgate has released two new viral websites in anticipation of the post-apocalyptic vamp flick.

The first site is a play on the pharmaceutical company Bromley/Marks, a powerful vampire run corporation. All the art for the film depicting the big business has been propaganda-esque. I suppose you can see a smudge of that in the vampire chick hairstyles on the site, but overall it feels kind of blah to me. Biggest bummer is that the links don't work. Perhaps they'll fix that.

There's also a site for vampire recruitment over here which features a gaunt vamp asking you to fill out a form to turn your friends to the dark side. If you don't move fast enough he gets pissy with you.

In Daybreakers, Ethan Hawke is Edward Dalton, a vampire researcher who refuses to feed on human blood, and tries to perfect a blood substitute that may sustain vampires and spare the few remaining humans. Enter Audrey, a human survivor who leads him to a startling medical breakthrough. The fate of the human race rests in their hands. The film also stars Sam Neill, Willem Dafoe, Michael Dorman and Vince Colosimo. Check out William Goss' Fantastic Fest review of Daybreakers here.

Ten years from now, 95% of the human population has been transformed into vampires, with those few uninfected survivors evading capture as best they can and those already captured being farmed for every last drop of their blood. However, supplies are dwindling, substitutes aren't working, and vampires who are driven by starvation to feed on one another tend to mutate for the worse.

This is the world of Daybreakers, a more ambitious and straight-faced follow-up than anyone might've expected from the Spierig Brothers in the wake of their cheeky low-budget aliens-and-zombies debut, Undead; better yet, it's a smarter and more refreshing take on the vampire genre than most of late, and a solid action flick in its own right.

Just as sci-fi fans are already often claiming 2007's Sunshine as a personal fave, flaws be damned, many of us horror types have fallen back on 1997's Event Horizon as a guilty pleasure at the very least, if not something a bit more solid. Mind you, we're talking about what is arguably Paul W.S. Anderson's best directorial effort to date, so 'good for what it is' is about as apt a descriptor as I can think of.

At any rate, the eponymous ship has returned from its lengthy departure to parts unknown, and our rescue crew -- including Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill, as the engineer who created the ship's black-hole-opening device -- soon discovers that remnants of its detour to a hellish alternate dimension remained on board.