Night Teeth, the uber genre film with some... teeth...

What do you get when you mix the popular theme of a uber driver type situation getting in over his head and throw in vampires? Netflix’s newest offering Night Teeth.

For me Night teeth was far more charming and fun than Tom Cruises Collateral, or even the very good
Mark Dacascos’s One Night in Bangkok, or groan Stuber.

I really loved Night Teeth more than i thought i would and it has great, action, visuals, and a great popcorn movie with more depth than you would expect! Id love to hear others impressions…

I just read a very positive review of it over at Polygon and added it to my watch list. I’ll try to post my thoughts when I get around to watching it. Maybe on Halloween night.

Hey homie…is that my blood bag?

First of all, what’s with the Stuber hate? Stuber is a fine mismatched buddies comedy with some fun R-rated shenanigans. I won’t stand for any drive-by groaning about Stuber! Drax won’t stand for it either!

But I’m with you on First Teeth, @David2! It’s absolutely wonderful. A charming throwback to the overall vibe of Something Wild, where the lovable repressed lead is drawn into a night of liberating thrills, peril, and intrigue by his very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl. So what if she’s a vampire? Magic Pixie Dream Girls are more fun. Even if they’re probably going to get you killed by the end of the night. Heck, in this case, they might be the ones who kill you.

Director Adam Randall’s last movie was I See You, which was a slow-burn mystery with a weirdly abrupt solution. But Night Teeth, by a different screenwriter, has none of that structural gimmickry. It’s all very up-front, drenched in color and neon and shots of LA and some pretty stylish filmmaking. The opening exposition might make you think you’re about to watch a comic book adaptation, an animated movie, or a videogame. Night Teeth is front-loaded with some nonsense about vampire empires in Los Angeles.

But then it settles down for a story about characters. And since this is ultimately a romance, like Something Wild, the key to making it work is the two leads. They don’t have the star power of Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith on the big screen, but they have charisma and chemistry to spare. Debbie Ryan is one of those child actors who grew up on the Disney Channel and is now armed with a formidable smoldering sexuality. She has to have more range than Lucy Fry as the more fun over-the-top murderous vampire girl, and she gets a nice monologue about her past pre-vampire life. More importantly, she has to click with the male lead, played by Jorge Lendeborg. I’ve seen him before playing supporting roles, but he has no problem carrying Night Teeth. He’s one of those actors brimming with sincerity and it’s a great foil to Abbie Ryan’s confidence. There’s even a whole storyline about his brother that works because Lendeborg is so appealing.

I was really surprised to see that this was shot partly in New Orleans, because the production leans into the Los Angeles setting and I would have sworn it was all shot here. There are certainly a lot of LA exteriors, including some scenes that an indie movie like this normally wouldn’t be able to afford.

Finally, there’s the title. I thought it was the dumbest title as the movie started. Night Teeth? Really? You’re going to name your vampire movie “Night Teeth”? But as it progressed and developed as a throwback to the fun urban adventures of the 80s – Something Wild, After Hours, and Adventures in Babysitting all come to mind – I realized that the title is pretty much perfect.

-Tom

LOL i cant tell if your yanking my chain or not…but i actually like Dave Bautista a lot, AND i actually liked his mismatched buddies story in My Spy way better than Stuber. I found him quite endearing in that role, and actually watched it twice…

Otherwise your review of Night Teeth is spot on!

Well this thread is certainly a revelation! I didn’t know Stuber existed, but the combination of Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani sounds irresistible. The way some of you yobs feel about Dwayne Johnson is basically how I feel about Dave - he just seems like a jolly giant, and I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve seen him in. Putting this one in the queue.

But Night Teeth? Wow yeah, if I were flipping through the Netflix movie list and saw a movie called ‘Night Teeth’ I’d probably go ‘ha ha, whatever’ and keep on going. I don’t recognize any of the actor movies but what the heck, I’m always in the market for a good horror flick.

Well, I guess I’ll be the downer and poo-poo the movie. I liked the interaction between
Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Debby Ryan and I loved the shots of Lucy Fry hanging out of the limo window while bolts whizzed by, but that’s about it.

First, the evil dude’s plan was dumb, which okay I get that evil plans being dumb or shortsighted are a feature, not a bug, but I had a hard time even figuring out Alfie Allen’s logic. He hired Jay to drive his assassins around and Jay wasn’t supposed to realize he was being duped until the end? WTF. Jay knew who the vamp bigwigs were and where they lived. How would he not know right away what was going on? Why would Jay have not cancelled after his girl was kidnapped? Did Alfie Allen think Jay would put the search for his girlfriend aside to drive a limo because an obligation is an obligation?

Second, despite liking the interactions of the leads, I never bought the growing love between the driver and the vamp. They were sweet together, but I couldn’t get past the idea that the same person stone-cold killing a bunch of vamps and humans all night gave a shit about this rando she just met.

Finally, the violence, what little there was, didn’t make any sense either. That was mostly because the killings happened largely off-screen. How, exactly did they get the drop on all those other vamps at the party? They all have basically the same level of unarmed lethality, right? How did Alfie Allen kill Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney after he declared his intent and after they had declared their intent to kill him? These are pretty shit vampires.

Agreed, but immaterial? I would say the villain’s plot doesn’t really matter as anything other than an excuse to set up the two leads. And the brother stuff is a subplot, if anything. It’s kind of funny how I thought the brother was dead in one scene, but that’s only because they didn’t really care to show you what happened to him. But, yeah, none of it really holds up to scrutiny.

Agreed, but again immaterial? I don’t think the movie is the least bit interested in the staging of the kills. It’s just part of the hand-waving around the villain’s plot and it’s all in service of getting the leads into their comedy of errors.

I might go so far as to say Night Teeth is a romantic comedy. The situation is certainly implausible, but if the chemistry is real, does it matter? That’s obviously a rhetorical question, because for you the answer was “yes”, but for me the answer was “no”. I didn’t mind the implausibility since the two leads were getting along so well. And a lot rides on Debbie Ryan’s character being torn between her loyalty to Lucy Fry as she’s unraveling and her sympathy for George Lendeborg Jr. as he gets himself deeper in trouble. The movie is a lot more interested in that dynamic than the workings of its vampires. Who, yes, are “pretty shit vampires”, as you put it. The fact that they got Meghan Fox for one scene – and she’s so bad in that scene! – is pretty hilarious.

Reminded me of the shot of Heath Ledger hanging out the side of the cop car in Dark Knight. Probably an intentional nod?

-Tom

I think a lot of my complaints would’ve gone away if the movie had just not had vampires at all. Same plot, just with mundane villains like a war between cartels or something. Drop the idea that Jay drove a limo at all, and just have Benny be the driver, while Jay and his gang are vigilantes against the drug lords. But I know the deal. That plot gets no money while a “neon rom-com bloody vampire assassins” adventure gets produced.

It’s very light on the Com part of Romcom though? The visit to grandma’s house was straight out of one, but I don’t think any other scenes really did. But yes, the movie was definitely some kind of love story rather than what was implied by the genre, description, and thumbnails on Netflix.

For me, this kind of complete genre bait and switch, rather than just subverting the genre, rarely works. The entire reason I started watching it was that I was in the mood for the kind of movie the claimed it would be. It took like half the movie for me to realize that it wasn’t just a slow burn, but there was no burn there at all. And then it was either finish watching the movie I wasn’t actually interested in right now, or feel I’d wasted 50 minutes. I chose to finish watching for exactly the things mentioned above that the movie got right, with the chemistry between the leads and the use color.

But if I’m watching a thriller, I’m going to be paying attention to the high level plot and the actions vs. motivations of all the players, because that’s the space where a thriller plays. If I’m watching a movie that starts off with a long-winded animated explanation of their mythology, I’m going to be paying attention to how the supernatural is supposed to work.

This kind of thing just seems like a really bad gamble for a movie maker to take. High risk of the movie falling flat for most of the initial audience, in exchange for a low reward in some of them thinking that it was a clever twist. The only time I can remember this kind intentional mislead of the genre working for me was Cold Pursuit, but it used two genres with more similarities, and revealed the switch a lot sooner. And it too got absolutely massacred in the reviews and word of mouth due to this.

Audition is the one that works best for me, and it’s among my favourite movies of all time.

For me, the chemistry didn’t feel real. It was just something the movie wanted to make happen, so it did. But I was relatively happy to go along with it. I do agree with @Telefrog that it would probably have worked better as a rom-com/urban misadventure without the vampire elements (the climax felt particularly lame on that front too).