Night Teeth (2021)

Night Teeth arrives as a 2021 Netflix vampire thriller from director Adam Randall, and it conducts itself with the streamlined indifference of a car service app. A college student named Benny spends one evening chauffeuring two young women, Blaire and Zoe, between the nightclubs of Los Angeles, then learns they are vampires with a list of errands that end in slaughter. The city is the film's most persuasive character. Boyle Heights, the truce, the human council keeping peace with the undead: a functional mythology, delivered without a single speech about tolerance. The ensemble happens to be led by Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and stocked with Latino performers, Raul Castillo and Marlene Forte among them. The casting reads as a natural product of the setting. Nobody announces it. This is the correct way to do such things.

The two female leads hold weapons, drive the plot, and kill several men before the first act ends, though the film uses them as villains and resolves Blaire into romantic attachment to Benny, which dampens the empowerment reading. Victor, the vampire lord, keeps human prisoners as blood bags and murders his fellow nobles to seize their power. A viewer hunting for a parable about oligarchy could find one, but the film has no interest in supplying it. We watch a bored rich monster do bored rich monster things. The screenplay treats this as plot, not argument. The finale is sunlight, stabbing, and a car alarm repurposed as a weapon.

There is no environmental subtext, no reexamination of history, no interior life beyond appetite. Characters eat, betray, and expire. Nobody pauses to instruct the audience on how to feel about any of it, and the credits roll without an epilogue. For the classifier this is a dry vintage: neither offensive nor instructive, competent at a modest level. Rotten Tomatoes places it at 38 percent, a figure that feels accurate the way a bathroom scale is accurate. It is a pleasant way to spend an evening and will not trouble your conscience or improve it.