Blaire, with a red-lipstick pout and bohemian bangs, is the “nice” one who flirts with Benny when the people standing in a velvet-rope line mock him for being dressed like a service worker, she comes up and kisses him. Zoe, in leather pants, with a voracious grin and hair piled high on her head, is a bratty terrorist alpha female, like Harley Quinn minus the charm.
But the two look bored enough to suggest that yes, they do this Kill Bill shit every night. “Are you out here every night, doing this Kill Bill shit?” asks Benny. None! I mean, you could count the fact that Zoe (Lucy Fry) and Blaire (Debby Ryan) are taunting fashionistas as an expression of something, but the film does next to nothing with it. It’s indifferently told, with the air of a glum “action” crime film, though the real problem is that “Night Teeth” has no metaphor. It has none of the mystery or enticement or danger that gave those other vampire tales their bite. The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it. The central character, Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), is a gawky cute college kid and aspiring EDM composer who, filling in for his brother as a chauffeur, spends one long night driving around a pair of vampire vixens who come on as lethally jaded dolled-up party-hoppers. “ Night Teeth,” a Netflix vampire thriller set in Los Angeles, would like, in some halfhearted way, to give a spin to the genre.
(Jim Jarmusch’s slow-drip “Only Lovers Left Alive” demonstrated, with a druggy wink, that sitting through a vampire movie could make you feel like you’d lived as long as a vampire.) “The Lost Boys” converted vampirism into ’80s youth-movie hipsterism, “True Blood” tapped the progressive side of vampires, and the “Twilight” books and blockbuster movies made the vampire into an expression of alienated teen-romantic outsider-ness.
In the mid-’70s, when the genre had come to seem musty, Stephen King’s “‘Salem’s Lot” (1975) and Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire” (1976) revived it by plugging the gothic tropes of old horror movies into the eccentric nooks and crannies of the contemporary world. Since the logistics of neck-biting and blood-sucking are no longer incendiary, a vampire movie, novel, or TV series that strikes a chord will tend to be infused with a tasty metaphor, one that reaches beyond the “erotic” obvious. The vampire genre is a lot like a vampire: It has lived for hundreds of years, and every time you think it’s about to die off it gets an infusion of new blood.
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