Vampire Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke, left) and ex-vampire Elvis (Willem Dafoe) try to save human civilization in the horror film Daybreakers. (Ben Rothstein/Maple Pictures)Is it just me, or does the vampire/zombie plague movie seem so last decade? From the remake of I Am Legend to the revival of George A. Romero’s Living Dead franchise, the sub-genre got a bloody good workout in the Oughts. For a Johnny-come-lately like Daybreakers to have any bite, it would need to offer us a startlingly original twist.

Alas, while Australian writer-directors Michael and Peter Spierig have alighted on a cool concept – a gory allegory for dwindling natural resources – they don’t have the artistry to cultivate it. Daybreakers is one of those slick horror flicks that raises your hopes in the first half-hour, only to then smash them to smithereens as though they were a beaker full of plasma. Not even the movie’s choice cast of offbeat actors – Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill – can put the brakes on its breakneck descent into vampire schlock.

Daybreakers is one of those slick horror flicks that raises your hopes in the first half-hour, only to then smash them to smithereens as though they were a beaker full of plasma.

The Spierigs start with a post-plague scenario. It’s 2019 and most of the human race has been transformed into vampires. The military-industrial complex, naturally, has capitalized on the demand for blood by hunting and harvesting the remaining humans. Only now, the human-blood supply is rapidly depleting, while animal substitutes have proved inadequate.

Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist working in R&D for Bromley Marks, a major blood-producing corporation, whose task is to create a synthetic blood that will avert the growing crisis. To make things worse, vampires who go without blood for too long degenerate into hideous, bat-like creatures, complete with wings, claws and pointy ears. Edward is a reluctant vampire — who, unfortunately, shares the same name as the hero of the Twilight series, another ambivalent vamp — and has been quietly shunning human blood. Now, his ears are growing noticeably skyward.

The film creates an amusing vision of day-to-day (or, rather, night-to-night) urban vampire life, where crowds of pasty, orange-eyed citizens queue at coffee bars for their daily café au sang. Everybody smokes, too, because, heck, they’re immortal. The police keep unruly vamps in line with giant, pronged Tasers. If you have to venture forth during the deadly daylight hours, there’s an underground system of tunnels as well as blacked-out cars that can be driven using video monitors. The hunted humans, meanwhile, live in the country in frightened packs and wield crossbows with wooden spikes. (They’ve obviously been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

The blood/oil parallel is equally clever. Television news programs speculate on “the end of blood.” Hungry consumers riot when their ration of the red stuff is reduced. Neill plays Bromley, the profit-driven CEO of Bromley Marks, who pays lip service to alternative fuels but is really vested in maintaining the human-blood status quo.

Edward goes up against this blood-sucking capitalist after he falls in with a band of renegades fighting for, ahem, human rights. Among them is Elvis (Dafoe), a former vampire who has unexpectedly reverted to his human state. His cure, somehow involving a skin-sizzling exposure to sunlight, could be the answer to the survival of the human race. Dafoe, wiry and ginger-bearded, looks a lot like Levon Helm, the Arkansas member of The Band; he also sounds like him. Elvis is a good ol’ boy mechanic who loves his Mustangs and Trans-Ams, and is a badass with a crossbow, too. Reciting the lyrics to Burning Love, his trademark smirk as wide as the Mississippi, Dafoe comes close to injecting the movie with some much-needed camp. Too bad the Spierigs’ script gives him little more than a series of dumb one-liners.

Sam Neill (centre) plays an unscrupulous blood baron in Daybreakers. (Ben Rothstein/Maple Pictures)Hawke, on the other hand, is all brooding intensity as Edward. Maybe he did think he was acting in a Twilight film. (Or possibly he assumed a movie called Daybreakers had to be another intellectual romance à la Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.) Neill, though, has no illusions about what kind of picture he’s in. Bloated as a puff adder, he sinks his incisors into the role of the nasty blood baron, generously applying the same unction he brought to his performance as Cardinal Wolsey in The Tudors. He’s an entertaining villain.

But entertainment, like blood, is in increasingly short supply as the movie drags on. There’s a tiresome sibling conflict between Edward and his kid brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), a human-hunting soldier, and a romance between Edward and Audrey (Claudia Carvan), one of the rebel humans, that's so tentative it's almost invisible. Significant characters aren’t introduced until late in the film, then are quickly discarded. The storytelling is a cliché-riddled mess.

Perhaps it’s to be expected, given the Spierigs were also responsible for the poorly received 2003 zombie feature Undead. The twin brothers, who also do their films’ visual effects, show more talent for imagery than character development and coherent plotting. Daybreakers’ blue-lit, Blade Runner-esque world – designed by Dark City's George Liddle – includes seriously creepy shots of the Bromley Marks factory, where pathetic naked humans, hanging like wilted petals from giant metal stalks, have their blood drained. And connoisseurs of the visceral will enjoy the varieties of gore on offer – from the rare, ruby-red blood that Bromley savours like a vintage Bordeaux, to the gooey shower of guts that spatters the laboratory windows after the unlucky subject of one of Edward’s experiments unexpectedly explodes.

With stronger writing and directing, Daybreakers might’ve had the makings of a horror classic. Instead, like a vampire under a sunlamp, it just dissolves into a bloody mess.

Daybreakers opens Jan. 8.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.