“Night Teeth” is a candy-striped cocktail of a movie, the sort mixed up by a bartender who knows the kids at the club haven’t yet acquired the taste—or the patience—for the top shelf stuff. It’s a vampire thriller with its eyes fixed, not on the metaphysics of the undead or the ache of immortality, but on making sure the neon reflects off a cheekbone just so, and that nobody, not even the most hapless human, ever need pause to question why vampires so often look like a fashion ad left out in the rain.
In a season where Netflix doled out “Midnight Mass”—an angry sermon of blood and despair, its religious fervor doused in dread—“Night Teeth” is purely and blessedly unserious. This is a film that sips at the mythology but doesn’t want to taste it, schooling us in truce councils and vampire/human diplomacy only until it’s time for the next round of club-hopping and nightclub carnage. The lore trickles in through a monologue at the start, but like so much of the movie’s worldbuilding, it’s soon lost in the blur of colored lights and star cameos.
The bones of the plot—ragtag cabbie (Jorge Lendeborg Jr., endearing as Benny) shanghaied into serving as the night’s taxi for two vampiric femme fatales—are lifted wholesale from “Collateral.” Only, where Michael Mann’s film marinated in looming dread, “Night Teeth” is content to soak itself in bubblegum-tinged ultraviolence and a playlist cribbed from a Spotify synthwave mixtape. The central gimmick—the deadly nocturne odyssey, hit after hit—is abandoned halfway through in favor of more conventional action, a romance between Benny and the not-so-bloodless Blaire (Debby Ryan), and a muddle of power grabs among the vampiric one percent.
About that: The film toys with class metaphors—these are vampires as L.A.’s rich, partying their way through a city oblivious to their hungers—but it never sinks its teeth into the subject. “Night Teeth” hints that the true horror is how the privileged feast while the masses drift by, but it gives up the metaphor for the promise that, in the end, being rich, hot, and (sorta) immortal just means more after-parties. Like so many films eager to flash their canines and bare no soul, it has the trappings of satire but doesn’t dare risk the bite.
Let’s not pretend, either, that Alfie Allen, able as he is, gets much to chew on as the villain Victor. He is all sleek malice and velvet threat, a Big Bad orphaned by an underwritten script. The side plots—gangsters moonlighting as peacemakers, mysterious bigwigs with slayers on speed dial—are reduced to tantalizing glimpses, the sort that might have fleshed out a lesser film’s mythology into something juicy. Here, all are merely window dressing for another round of antiseptic nightclub carnage.
But what “Night Teeth” does offer is energy—a fleet, giddy sense of movement, and actors who seem game to play in the sandbox of silly. Debby Ryan’s Blaire and Lucy Fry’s Zoe make for an odd couple of predators, their performances pitched just shy of camp, as if they know this film is destined for the midnight circuit of teenage sleepovers rather than the annals of horror cinema. There is a certain affection, even, for their scenes with Benny, whose anxious, wide-eyed optimism lands like a squeaky toy in the midst of a bloodbath.
Visually, the film sparkles—Director Adam Randall and his cinematographer give the L.A. night a synthetic sheen, all shimmer and pulse, as if trying to out-DreamWorks DreamWorks. It’s “style over substance” as mission statement, and for much of its runtime, it’s enough. Even the action—dosed out in brisk, glossy segments—is fun in a way that doesn’t beg you to care about the stakes (no pun intended).
Of course, the Netflix teaser poster, all lurid promise and semi-recognizable faces, is a kind of bait-and-switch: Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, advertised as if their roles would ignite the screen, breeze in and out in less time than it takes to mix a Bloody Mary. Their appearances are metatextual jokes, an inside wink to a generation attuned to cameos as clickbait.
“Night Teeth” won’t outlive the month in memory; it’s a one-night-only Halloween treat. But like many a disposable sugar rush, it’s tough to begrudge it its pleasures. The soundtrack is so omnipresent it feels like being locked in a Hot Topic, yet there’s fun to be had in surfing the surface—especially when so much contemporary horror asks us to drown in existential misery. The kids—especially the ones for whom this might be their first vampire night out—will love it. The rest of us can enjoy it, with a sheepish grin, for what it is.
You finish “Night Teeth” as you might leave an overpriced club at 2 a.m.—dazed, a bit overstimulated, certain you’ll forget half of it by breakfast, but not altogether ungrateful for having been there.
