Day Shift: Well-done stake

Day Shift (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, gore and profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.19.22

This is the sort of film that would have scandalized your parents, had they caught you watching it as a kid.

 

Actually, more than a few adults likely would be similarly horrified, were they to dial it up by mistake.

 

When the vampire-hunting Bud (Jamie Foxx, right) is saddled with Seth (Dave Franco),
a nerdish, pencil-pushing babysitter, the latter is warned to stay the heck out of the way.
What could possibly go wrong?

The rest of us will have a grand time.

Director J.J. Perry’s kick-ass horror comedy won’t be more than a gory footnote in cinema history, but it boasts momentum, a sassy script by Tyler Tice and Shay Hatten, and a richly entertaining performance by star Jamie Foxx. It’s fun to see him return to his comedy roots, although this isn’t actually a comedic performance; the humor derives from the way Foxx plays this material straight, with deadpan sincerity, even as everything around him slides into cheerfully gruesome lunacy.

 

Matters begin innocuously, as San Fernando Valley pool cleaner Bud Jablonski (Foxx) arrives at the home of his latest client. Ah, but Bud isn’t your average pool cleaner. Trays of chemicals are a cover for somewhat more lethal tools, as he quietly slides inside this homeowner’s residence.

 

And the apparently terrified little old lady within isn’t nearly as helpless or frail as she seems.

 

Let us pause, for a moment, to acknowledge that this isn’t an old-school vampire movie, wherein the fanged nasties can be dispatched with a simple wooden stake through the heart. No, Tice and Hatten have gone old-school, where legend dictated that decapitation was the only way to truly kill a vampire.

 

Needless to say, make-up designer Christopher Nelson and his massive team are kept quite busy, with what soon follows.

 

Bud’s unusual profession notwithstanding, he’s an ordinary blue-collar guy struggling to make ends meet. The financial situation suddenly grows dire when his estranged wife, Jocelyn (Meagan Good), threatens to move their daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax) to Florida. This isn’t a fit of pique; Bud and Jocelyn’s relationship is prickly but still mutually devoted. She simply can’t get by on what Bud has been providing.

 

Things have indeed been tight, since the headstrong Bud was thrown out of the more lucrative international union of vampire hunters, following numerous code violations. It has been difficult to make ends meet, when his only income has derived from selling fangs to seedy black-market dealers such as Troy (Peter Stormare).

 

Bud begs for just a few more days; he then swallows his pride, enlists the support of his legendary vampire-hunting pal, Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg), and begs to be reinstated by hard-ass union boss Seeger (Eric Lange).

 

Seeger derives considerable joy from agreeing, with a no-argument stipulation: Bud must be babysat by nerdy union rep Seth (Dave Franco), a desk-bound pencil-pusher who’s finicky enough to note even the slightest transgression.

Never Look Away: You simply can't!

Never Look Away (2018) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for graphic nudity, sexual content, dramatic intensity and brief violent images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.1.19

He who saves one life, saves the world entire.

It therefore stands to reason that he who destroys one life, destroys the world entire. And he who destroys many lives, destroys a galaxy of worlds.

When finally given the opportunity to create any sort of art that he desires, Kurt (Tom
Schilling) finds it difficult to reverse years of the repressive limitations he was forced
to observe, lest he come to the attention of the wrong sort of people.

Hold that thought.

German writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is like getting thoroughly absorbed by a sweeping historical novel … and I mean that in the best possible way.

Von Donnersmarck previously brought us 2006’s mesmerizing The Lives of Others, which deservedly won the Oscar for that year’s best foreign film, and also should have been nominated — at the very least — for screenplay.

He’s clearly intrigued by what prompted the madness that infected his country during the Nazi years, and the repression that followed amid the subsequent blockaded decades, prior to the barriers coming down in November 1989 (and the Berlin Wall’s destruction, two years later). 

The Lives of Others focused on a Stasi (secret police) operative inexorably drawn into the desires and behavior of those he surveilled over the course of several years. Never Look Away takes a much longer view of how one young man’s life becomes woven — without his awareness — into the fabric of a heinous Nazi loyalist.

Von Donnersmarck opens his new film in 1937 Dresden, as 6-year-old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) is taken by his beloved young aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), to see the touring Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibit at a nearby museum. Von Donnersmarck takes his time with this sequence, as cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s camera slowly pans over works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner and others, while a smug Nazi guide contemptuously dismisses everything as a “disgusting sign of mental illness.”

But young Kurt is transfixed, with whispered encouragement from Elisabeth. “Never look away,” she tells the boy. Never be afraid of something new, something different, something challenging.

Alas, her three-word mantra soon takes on an entirely different meaning.