'Daybreakers,' a canny mix of gore and guile

OK, I surrender - this is the age of the vampire and it's best to go along for the ride.

Vampires are the metaphor du jour - for racial and sexual minorities ("True Blood"), for teen sexuality ("Twilight") and for Goldman Sachs.

In the nifty thriller "Daybreakers," vampires prey upon humans, but there is no mistaking the undercurrent here: they are us.

This slickly designed movie takes place in a near future metropolis where vampires are the dominant species, living off the rationed blood of remaining humans, who are farmed for their plasma in corporate warehouses.

Well-to-do vampires live in modern town houses and drive fancy sleek cars with camera navigation and mega-tinted windows for daytime driving, when the sun's glare might kill them (global warming connotations are encouraged).

They may be courting catastrophe, but their wealth insulates them - they stop at vampire Starbucks, and order plasma in a variety of flavors and sizes.

They are, in fact, leading pretty cushy and contented lives, and most don't dwell on the grotesquerie that makes their lifestyles possible.

This type of satire, with its snarky potshots at consumerism and consumption, can backfire if it turns snotty, but "Daybreakers" gets the tone mostly right.

It won me over early, with a visual tour of a vampire Times Square that featured an enormous digital billboard of a lovely young brunet hoisting a diamond watch, wearing a smile that gives us just a glimpse of her protruding fangs. "Daybreakers" prefers the visual joke to the lecture, and is the better for it.

The story follows Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a corporate vampire scientist trying to develop a synthetic blood substitute before the voracious vampire culture consumes the last of its most precious natural resource, human blood.

Nightly vampire news blares with reports of blood riots in third-world countries, and already shortages and rationing are affecting the affluent West, where Dalton works feverishly to find an alternative fuel, if you will.

There are some effectively gory scenes of Dalton experimenting with blood substitutes on volunteer soldiers (more pointed commentary). "Daybreakers" is the work of Aussie horror-meisters Michael and Peter Spierig, who favor explosive jolts of violence, eruptions that function as a nice counterpoint here to the movie's cool demeanor and tone.

Dalton's frantic search for a cure takes him among rebel human survivors, who hide in the daylight and in the countryside. Their leader (Willem Dafoe) is a former vampire who claims to have found a vampirism "cure," the nature of which gives the movie more room for metaphoric fun and games.

"Daybreakers" has been sitting on a shelf for a year or more, and I'm not sure why. It's a canny mix of gore and guile, enough exploding viscera for the modern horror fans, enough cheeky social satire for moviegoers thirsty for a little more.

It's gross, it looks cool, and, for a B movie, is well-appointed with good actors. I particularly liked Sam Neill as the movie's designated corporate villain, with an awesomely tailored vampire frock that looks like something Armani might have made from a Nazi uniform.

"Daybreakers" is a horror movie for an age of limited resources, but there is apparently no limit on resourceful ways to find something new to do with vampires.