One is a vampire horror comedy, the other is an alien horror comedy. Neither of them fully rose to the occasion, and both were longer than they needed to be, but one fared better than the other.
DAY SHIFT (2022)
Day Shift has some fantastic vampire action scenes, but like most movies today that stretch their runtime to almost 2 hours, a paper-thin plot can’t sustain itself for that long. As a result, the kick ass fight scenes are spread out between excessive filler.
Dave Franco steals the show as the comic relief later in the movie, because Jamie Foxx’s character is almost as lackluster as Blade—and he doesn’t even get the edge of being a vampire. He is merely a vampire hunter. Based on the press this was getting a few months back, I was under the impression it was going to be a horror comedy buddy movie with Foxx and Snoop Dogg as the buddies, which would have been a blast, but we don’t even get much of them together.
After a rockin’ opening fight scene with a vamp, we learn that Foxx is a pool cleaner moonlighting at an underground vampire hunting organization…which gives him the boot. So, with a vengeful female vampire after him, he ends up setting out on his own to do his job.
Actually he does the job with the help of some friends, including Snoop Dogg, Dave Franco, Steve Howey (aka: Van from the Reba show), and action movie hottie Scott Adkins.
Howey and Adkins come in as a brother team for some of the vampire fights and really save the film just when it’s starting to drag. They also look sizzling hot together. It would have been cool if they were a queer couple to really piss off the anti-woke crowd, but this film isn’t looking to be colorful.
For a horror comedy that so perfectly delivers on the vampire action, I’m really shocked that it mostly bombs on the humorous part.
OFFICE INVASION (2022)
I spent a good chunk of this 113-minute movie thinking that this trend of making every film almost 2 hours long needs to end because NOTHING IS HAPPENING. I was getting so much pressure from the hubby about how boring the film was that I was sure he was just going to go into the bedroom to watch something else. I kept swearing it would pick up any minute when all alien hell broke loose. The film proved me to be a liar.
It’s a fucking horror comedy about office workers taking on aliens. Just fucking run with it. What the fuck? Why do I have to sit through endless, unnecessarily drawn out plot about the business and the people working there?
To start with an opening kill of a night security guard being stripped to the bone and then have nothing alien happen for the next 90 minutes is unforgivable. If I wanted to sit through two hours of The Office, I’d just binge The Office, and I’d laugh a hell of a lot more in the process.
It seriously feels like a different writer was called in to write the last 23 minutes of Office Invasion to save it.
The three main guys finally sneak into their office building to steal something and uncover an alien plot behind the scenes. Then, for about ten minutes, each of them goes and confronts one alien in human disguise. It is definitely fun for a few minutes, but that’s all we get. There’s no teamwork to take down a whole building of aliens or anything. It’s just shameful.
And this film ends with the promise of a sequel. Maybe they should’ve just written the sequel, cut out the 90 boring minutes that are sure to stretch that one to 2 hours as well, and filmed the sequel back-to-back with the first film then edited them together to make one halfway decent 60-minute movie…
