Director William Kaufman’s “Daylight’s End” is “30 Days of Night,” meets “Dawn 04” with “Assault on Precinct 13” thrown in for good measure. Sadly, while it’s nowhere near the masterpiece the aforementioned Carpenter film is, it’s silly, goofy, occasionally clumsy, fun late night movie fodder. In the heydays of cable television I could picture sneaking out of bed, and checking this out on one of the premium movie channels at three in the morning.
Years after a mysterious plague has devastated the planet and turned most of humanity into blood-hungry Zombie-Vampire creatures, a rogue drifter named Rourke, on a vengeful hunt for an alpha vampire-zombie stumbles across a band of survivors in an abandoned police station. There, he meets the survivors and reluctantly agrees to try to help them defend themselves and escape to the sanctuary they so desperately need. But that doesn’t prove so easy as the zombie vampires, including the Alpha, seem dead set on getting Rourke.
“Daylight’s End” doesn’t have much in the way of brains but for a claustrophobic horror actioner similar to a FPS game, I had a good time with it. Fans of the FPS shooter genre will especially enjoy Kaufman’s use of the limited scenery, consistently featuring vampire zombies running up and down prison corridors and popping out of cells. It amounts to a good time and something more of a novelty that makes up for the lack of a narrative. Lance Henriksen also adds a bit of flair to the otherwise pretty good cast, allowing something of an antagonist that makes it kind of difficult for our heroes and survivors to band together.
There’s a lot of claustrophobia and stir craziness at play here that not surprisingly invokes John Carpenter more often than not. I think that’s also the reason for the movie set mainly in an abandoned prison, but that’s doesn’t detract from the overall experience. That said there isn’t a lot of explanation to some plot elements. Like how is the alpha an alpha and why? Are there other alphas out there? Are the zombie vampires evolving? If the vampire zombies are hurt by sunlight, why not escape during the day? In either case, “Daylight’s End” is derivative, but goofy fun packing in solid action, brutal gore, and a solid cast of characters that we can root on.