Day Shift’s review & ending subtly gives away details of its world-building elements and hints at potential character beats while still leaving room for more.
Day Shift Review
Dollar theaters were venues where people could see movies for just a few bucks in their “second run,” after their initial buzz petered out and first-run theaters kicked them out to book something new. The prints were often beat-up, and sometimes the sound was warped from the film being played over and over in first-run houses. It didn’t matter, because admission was cheap and the movie was only part of the reason for buying a ticket. Dollar theaters thrived until well into the nineties, when video rental stores started getting new releases in a matter of weeks rather than months. But until that point, they were havens for lower-budget genre films, particularly R-rated fare: outrageous horror and science fiction pictures, action movies, s***ty teen comedies, erotic thrillers, and so on.
This little film exhibition history lesson is by way of letting you know that the straight-to-Netflix horror comedy “Day Shift” is a film out of its correct time period. When people say that a film is “made for theaters” they often mean that it’s opulent, expensive, and long. But this movie belongs in a different kind of theater. Its flaws would recede in a packed house full of paying customers who sat down buzzed on their intoxicant of choice, eager to watch something that pushed their b***ons. This is a movie that you talk back to, in excitement, fright, or amusement, or because it did something corny or dumb and you can feel that everyone around you recognizes it, too.
Jamie Foxx stars as Bud Jablonski, a working-class Los Angeles pool cleaner who hunts down vampires to sell their teeth for cash. Snoop Dogg is Bud’s mentor Big John Elliott, a legend who used to be in the vampire hunter’s union with Bud until the latter got kicked out for breaking too many rules and incurring too many disciplinary actions. (Kudos to the Van Helsings of Los Angeles for unionizing; hope they have a good medical plan, because they get knocked around a lot.) Bud is a struggling divorced father whose wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) still loves him but just can’t live with him because he’s never around and keeps too many secrets from her. The first part of the movie is about Bud ramping up his vampire hunting to accumulate and sell more teeth so that he can make $10,000 in less than a week, give it to Jocelyn to catch up on the mortgage, pay private school tuition for their adorable daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax), and eliminate the financial necessity of Jocelyn selling the house, moving away, and taking Paige with her.
Elsewhere in the City of Angels, beyond the awareness of Bud and his workaday money troubles, a conspiracy is brewing. Audrey San Fernando (Karla Souza) is a Mexican-American vampire who’s several centuries old but looks fabulous in the impeccably tailored power suits that she wears in her capacity as the owner and public face of a rapidly growing real estate empire. (“Day Shift” isn’t big on satire or subtext and doesn’t seem to want to be, but making the film’s most fearsome bloodsucker a real estate developer is a pretty good joke.) Audrey is buying up homes in the Jablonskis’ neighborhood to gentrify the place for bloodsuckers and create a homeland for them. She fixates on Bud because he killed an old lady vampire in the film’s protracted opening fight sequence and extracted her teeth.
“Day Shift” is a movie in the vein (har har) of “R.I.P.D.,” “Shaun of the Dead” and their early dollar theater progenitors: exuberantly goofy programmers like “Fright Night,” “The Kiss,” and “Return of the Living Dead.” These kinds of movies are silly and trashy by nature, deal in familiar tropes/cliches, have a fair share of placeholder dialogue, and never make a move without keeping one eye on the audience’s reaction, and they tend to vary in quality from brilliant and fun to awful but not without charm. This one falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but there’s no denying that it’s made with skill. Everyone in this cast does their best to strike the right balance between seeming in on the joke and acting like all of this bloody absurdity is normal.
The first half of “Day Shift” will seem tediously familiar if you’ve seen the sorts of movies that it’s modeling itself after—gore gag, joke, gore gag, joke, half-assed banter, shootout, etc. But first-time feature filmmaker J.J. Perry, a martial artist and former stuntman and stunt coordinator, keeps things chugging along, staging the mayhem with flair and humor, variously channeling “The Exorcist,” Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” films, and 1980s Hong Kong kung fu pictures, and setting up every battle in terms of escalating stakes and plans going awry. There are a few images in the film you can genuinely say you’ve never seen before, such as a drone shot that begins inside of a sports car, flies through an open sunroof, and rises over the road to take in a line of cars and bikes in a high-speed chase. The movie gets much more assured in the second half, when Bud and Audrey’s stories begin to intertwine, and it finds the right balance of goofy deadpan comedy, martial arts-inflected supernatural brawls, gunplay, car chases, and gore.
It seems counterintuitive to say this, but even though all of the characters in “Day Shift” fill predictable roles (stalwart hero, grizzled mentor, fretful wife, innocent daughter, etc.), each one of them is an individual, and the performers have fun playing them. Foxx is great at everything he does, and he makes a superb Schwarzenegger-like droll action figure here. The performance is reminiscent of Arnie in “Raw Deal,” where he’s the slightly befuddled straight man most of the time even though he’s a badass who can kill ten enemies before they can draw their guns from their holsters. Dave Franco is a standout as Seth, an inexperienced, easily rattled young vampire hunter who approaches his job with unearned arrogance and ends up going through a more complicated, funny, oddly touching personal journey than he or the audience could’ve expected. Snoop plays, essentially, Kris Kristofferson in the “Blade” films, Compton version. His comic pitch is impeccable, and with his skinny frame and six-foot-four height, he looks magnificent in a ten-gallon hat and leather vests and dusters, like an animated cartoon version of an Old West gunfighter.
Aside from a handful of twists in the final act, there’s nothing in “Day Shift” that you can’t see coming long before it shows up onscreen, and the more potentially emotional aspects of the story are treated as glancingly/jokingly as everything else. (You’ll know what’s being referred to when you watch the film; it’s the kind of parallel-constructed, “We’re not that different, you and I” plot element that a director like Guillermo del Toro would milk for melodrama.) If you imagine a raucous Friday night crowd reacting to everything that happens, the movie seems better than it is. Maybe Netflix should add one more audio track to offerings like this: Dollar Theater Audience.
Day Shift Ending
Ending Explained is a recurring column in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. This time, we consider the ending of the new Netflix action comedy Day Shift. Yes, prepare for spoilers.
Any way you slice it, J.J. Perry’s Day Shift is not your average vampire movie. This is a fact that rings true until its final shot. The film follows Bud (Jamie Foxx), a down-on-his-luck fella who harvests vampire fangs for cash.
Bud’s day job becomes a little complicated when he finds out that his ex-wife is planning to move their young daughter out of state if he can’t cough up $10k for her private school over the weekend. Faced with this problem, Bud realizes that his potentially lucrative (and very dangerous) profession is the one thing standing between his family being together or miles apart. So he quickly scrambles to get back into the union that kicked him out after he disgraced himself so that he can sell his findings for a larger chunk of cash.
The union reluctantly allows him back in – but only if straight-laced office worker Seth (Dave Franco) keeps a close eye on him while he’s out doing his business. So the odd couple goes about their killing business. Things are going relatively well until they run into an angry vampire named Audrey (Karla Souza), who is out for vengeance because Bud unknowingly killed her blood-sucking daughter. To up the stakes (pun intended), Audrey and her gang get ahold of Bud’s ex-wife Jocelyn (Meagan Good) and their young daughter. But after several close-calls and a tense final showdown, Bud ends up outsmarting Audrey with a razor wire trap and therefore saving his family from becoming creatures of the night.
Bud and co. don’t get away totally unharmed, however. Bud’s friend and mentor, Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg), heroically sacrifices himself with a bomb vest to save Bud’s family; meanwhile, Seth gets turned into a vampire. Despite this, Day Shift ends on an unquestionably optimistic note. Even though Seth is now a vampire, he is also still committed to being Bud’s friend – even if that means carrying his own head around.
Perhaps the most heartwarming moment in the ending of Day Shift, however, is the final shot which reveals that Big John is actually still alive. He climbs out of a street grate, smoking a joint, seemingly totally unbothered about what he just went through underground. He then lights another joint, says, “That’s what I love about L.A., all the damn vampires,” and then he walks off into the night. (For those keeping track, that essentially nods to the endings of both 1986’s Vamp and 1987’s The Lost Boys.)
This final line not only allows Day Shift to end in a positive light but also sets the film up for a sequel. It gives us two possibilities for the future of Big John. Either he had a near-death encounter and returned to battle more vampires, or he survived the blast because he is actually a vampire. Who knows – maybe he is “El Jefe,” the infamous vampire that, according to Seth, is 700 years old and is a Los Angeles druglord. We never see him, but he is apparently the most formidable vampire of them all. Either way, John’s final line reminds us that even though the gang got rid of Audrey and her cronies, there are still a lot more where she came from, especially as the most dangerous is still out there. Plus, we already know that Audrey was intentionally breeding a ton of new vampires in the Valley because she was worried that the vampire population was getting too low.
Now that Bud is officially in the union and Seth has climbed out of his shell and realized that he actually likes vampire hunting, too, a potential sequel might see the three joining forces and becoming something of a vampire-hunting trio.
The ending isn’t just happy for the three on a career level, though. Now that Bud’s wife finally found out what he really does as his day job, the two are able to finally start putting everything on the table and getting through the issues that caused them to separate in the first place. Although they haven’t agreed to officially get back together just yet, Jocelyn flirtily tells Bud that she’s happy to start getting to know him again, and the two drive off with their daughter.
When all is said and done, the real message of Day Shift is that family is more important than anything, and love will persevere when the going gets tough. Bud and his family were faced with a literal gang of bloodthirsty vampires, but in the end, they came out on top and stronger than ever before. The same goes for the friendship between Bud and Seth – the two are obviously an unlikely pair at first, but in the end, their relationship has clearly become one that will last a lifetime – even though one of them is a vampire.
There’s no telling whether Day Shift will have a sequel or not, but if it does, it’s a fair assumption that the inevitable face-off included will be even more intense than it is in the first installment. Not only can we predict that the vampires are going to be even stronger given Big John’s final statement on just how many vampires reside in L.A., but we also know that their opposing team – Bud, Seth, and Big John – are a vampire hunting force to be reckoned with.