Until, that is, a key vampire gets decapitated only to place his head right back on himself, like something out of “An American Werewolf in London.” There are also vamps who are loyal to humans rather than other vampires. That the vampires are killed by decapitation is the closest the film comes to having an inviolable law (sort of like “Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul”). Important rule: Don’t let the powder get in your butthole! Bud has a special orange-yellow powder to use in the shower for that. (That doesn’t come to much either.) And once they’re killed, they release a special gas that you’ve got to get off you. There’s a black-market sunblock that allows the vamps to be out in the SoCal daylight for maybe 20 minutes. How do you kill the vamps? By blasting them through the heart with special African hard wood, then cutting their heads off with a silver blade. Got it? Don’t worry if you don’t, because none of it comes to much. There are, in this movie, five types of vampires, organized by age: Southern, Eastern, Spider, Uber, and Juvenile. Sounds simple, right? But “Day Shift,” which is at once an undead action movie, a cheeky good cop/crazy cop buddy comedy, and the tale of a tough but saintly divorced dad out to save his family, is one of the more perversely twisty vampire flicks in recent memory. (If he doesn’t have the money by Monday, his ex-wife, played by Meagan Good, will move the kid to Florida.) He plans to get the cash by selling vampire fangs, which, once extracted, can be quite valuable, depending on which bloodsucker they come from. Bud’s one and only goal is to get his hands on $10,000, which he needs to pay for the braces and grade-school tuition of his 8-year-old daughter, Paige (Zion Broadnax). That gives it flavor but also weighs it down.įoxx plays Bud Jablonski, a Los Angeles vampire hunter whose day job is driving around in an ancient pick-up truck to clean and service swimming pools in the San Fernando Valley. Perry, “Day Shift” wants to be a dessert drenched in blood. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules - a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. “ Day Shift” is a vampire thriller stuffed with lock-and-load ultraviolence, starring Jamie Foxx in imperious badass mode.
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