Director: Adam Randall

Writer: Brent Dillon

Starring: Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Debby Ryan, Megan Fox, Lucy Fry, Alfie Allen, Raúl Castillo, and Alexander Ludwig

Rating: ★★

The history of films is filled with vampire stories, from Nosferatu to Twilight and everything In between. It’s a genre that will never die, literally. Night Teeth is the latest vampire film, released on Netflix. It’s a by-the-numbers story that doesn’t really do anything interesting and is destined to be lost in the endless scroll of Netflix’s seemingly endless content lists.

Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is a chauffeur working unsuspectedly for two vampires. He drives them to their destination and starts to get a little too nosey about who they are. Finding out his passengers are vampires; he is dragged into a conflict that has lasted generations. A truce between humans and vampires has been broken and Benny has to stay close to his passengers to survive.

This is a gorgeous film. The cinematography by Ebon Bolter is simply stunning. It looks incredibly stylish, with bright bold colours and great shots. There’s a scene early on with a car driving through a field of red flowers, with the contrasting with everything else on screen. It’s artistic and looks incredible. You could take a shot from that sequence and frame it.

Sadly, that’s where the good things dry up for Night Teeth. The story is incredibly dull and sloppy. It’s predictable and feels like things you’ve seen before. The story moves at a snail’s pace, dragging it out with pointless padding and is as stretched out as much as possible. It has good ideas, like the John Wick style hotel that the two vampires visit, complete with a medallion that is used to identify yourself, but nothing is done with it. The world isn’t interesting enough and the story doesn’t inject anything new into the vampire genre. It meanders along until it’s over and that’s about it.

The acting is all over the place. It’s not horrendous at any point, but there’s no great performances here. Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones) just isn’t believable as some kind of vampire mob boss. He’s not menacing at all. Debby Ryan (Muppets Most Wanted) delivers some incredibly unnatural dialogue that just sounds bad. The characters fall flat and it’s hard to be invested in them. Megan Fox is credited, but her role is a glorified cameo.

It’s not clear what type of film Night Teeth is trying to be. It’s a vampire film, with lots of blood and a fair bit of violence, but it’s not a horror film. The action isn’t entertaining, the fighting feels shallow, and the effects are shoddy, so it doesn’t work as an action film. It’s best compared to a crime film, with rival families. Whatever it’s trying to be, it just doesn’t work.

Night Teeth is best to be avoided. It looks stylish, but beyond that there’s nothing to make it worth watching. The story is boring, the characters are lifeless (pun intended) and the whole thing just crawls along until it dies.  

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