In Daybreakers, vampires are truly mainstream. They make up the bulk of the population, and have for 10 years. Humans who haven’t assimilated to this change in demographics hang on meat hooks; the vampires mine their veins, and squirt the blood into their morning coffee. (This is a clever touch, though the analogy seems a bit off. The undead need blood like the living need water—not half and half.) The few remaining human holdouts are hunted down, but they haven’t enough blood to satisfy the vampire society’s collective thirst; what’s needed is a red revolution in agriculture. Ethan Hawke plays Edward (a Twilight in-joke?), a hematologist working to produce synthetic blood for a profiteer named Bromley (Sam Neill). But Edward finds an alternative solution in “Elvis” (Willem Dafoe), a hick vampire who, when exposed to the sun, regenerated into a healthy human.

Unfortunately, one must squint to see this nifty premise through the cascading blood. Daybreakers’ fangs haven’t penetrated very far into the box office’s neck, and one can see why: It’s nibbling with baby teeth. This isn’t to say that I think it deserves failure. But it disappoints me that the German-born, Australia-based Spierig Brothers—Michael and Peter, who wrote and directed—seem to undermine their own intelligence. Released by Lionsgate, Daybreakers is in that dusky region between commercial bloodsuckers like Twilight; indie gadflies like Shadow of the Vampire or Cold Souls; ghoulish giggle-fests like Sorority Row or From Dusk Till Dawn; and Rob Zombie’s psychopathic orgies. Ethan Hawke is not a big enough name to fill a multiplex marquee, nor does he square with Michael Meyers. The Spierigs have opted for choppy scenes and shock cuts that people with heart conditions should be cautioned of; they also seem to have robbed a few blood banks in order to play platelet paintball at regular intervals. But nothing quite gels. The techniques seem derivative and beneath the subject.

Early on, when Edward’s lab coat appears in his rear-view mirror sans his face or hands, I sensed that the filmmakers were giving the generic conventions a playful poke. But the Spierigs—after setting up their world—don’t poke; they shove. When Dafoe’s hokey yokel ribs the audience with Southern circumlocutions, one almost cries out, “Bad touch!” A sense of relief set in when I realized how jocosely Dafoe plays the hackneyed role, but the whole comic weight of the movie is on his shoulders, and the Spierigs have lobbed him with a 10-ton sack of corn. While he’s stuck shucking, Hawke glowers like a low-energy, yuppie-haired Tom Cruise, and Edward’s should’ve-been love interest—played by Claudia Karvan—ossifies in the corner, stuck being the token chick. A pallid New Zealander named Michael Dorman plays Edward’s brother in the Army. It’s a sympathetic performance that elevates itself above the grindhouse; but, under duress, Dorman’s American accent regresses to a Christopher Walken impersonation.

Oozing with greasy, self-aware smoothness, Neill successfully toys with his James Masonry. He also provides me with a good segue. Bromley’s teenage daughter (played aptly by Isabel Lucas) is a still-human runaway who’s resisted conversion. Her pusillanimous pa has a minion bite her, and after she transforms, she tries to imbibe her own blood—to poison herself. Bromley attempts to intervene, but she foists her bleeding wrist on him, daring him to drink. And, for a moment, eerie intimations of an Electra complex wriggle out, and provide the movie with the morbid sexuality that has given vampires their cultural longevity. Like it or not, their myth has endured in part because they make necrophilia a seamy, train-wreck turn-on. (Frankenstein’s monster isn’t as kinky—though, depending on whose body parts he’s assembled from, he has potential.) Victorian mores are famously at the core of Dracula, but so is the encoded allure of sexual deviance. Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, merely continues the parochial hypocrisy—hanging smutty pin-ups on teenie-boppers’ walls, and then promising the kids a prize if they keep their hands idle. Daybreakers isn’t that hoity-toity; but it pumps blood everwhich way except one—down the channel that forks before hitting porno theaters and art houses.

It’s a shame that Daybreakers is so staidly solemn and—excepting the Bromley family trauma and a clever sublimatory shot of Edward thirstily ogling a female neck—sexless; it might have been a killer necking movie. (We never learn whether the undead are sexually active. If they are, that would pose an altogether different threat to their vampirocracy: overpopulation among immortals. Children of Men parallels be damned.) But this film does have some novelty: The setting is not merely post-Apocalyptic, but post-post-Apocalyptic. Twilight has already fallen on the human race, and now the curtain’s closing on our successors. That’s a worthy reason for everyone to gripe like Eeyore. But must the Matrix-y production design also share his dismal color scheme? You’d think that the vampires, being allergic to the sun, might opt for cheerier interior décor.

But, to be fair, the Spierigs’ aversion to camp is not entirely fruitless. Their allusions to the real world are somewhat broad and sometimes misplaced. Is the blood shortage a climate-change allegory, a human-rights concern, or a plea for non-conformity (à la the X-men)? I’m willing to accept the conflation as “ambiguity”—if not entirely artistic—because I admire the thoughtfulness that informs such nuances. And, besides, jabs at multi-billion-dollar industries (there’s a late-in-the-game feint at Big Pharma) sit with me better than broadsides about mentally afflicted individuals—an unfortunate side effect of last year’s Observe and Report.

There’s also a side to the Spierigs that seems surprisingly humane, and this may be predicated on their earnestness. Ever since I saw The Matrix in theaters, I’ve felt queasy about the ease with which our heroes dispatched their fellow humans. Since the victims were subsumed by the machines, killing them was like slaughtering civilians. When antagonistic vampires are decommissioned in Daybreakers, the killings seem more “justified”; and the filmmakers reserve a special compassion for the “subsider” subgroup: the bloodsuckers who’ve degenerated from not sucking enough blood. (This mutation is particularly rampant among the homeless, but spreading.) When a colony of these batmen is shown being hauled off to burst in the daylight, the Spierigs drum up genuine emotion—as if the shackled prisoners were en route to a Nazi death camp. Much of Daybreakers sucks, but it doesn’t suck you dry.