NIGHT PATROL is a movie released by Shudder (first in theaters, now on their service) that has a promising premise. It’s kinda like TRAINING DAY but the corrupt cops are also vampires. In fact, I didn’t catch it until reading the credits but the main character’s name is “Ethan Hawkins.” The tagline is “Defang the police.” That’s good. I like that.

It has a cool, grainy look to it (cinematographer: Benjamin Kitchens) and an ominous, synthy score by Pepijn Caudron (CAMINO). It even has David S. Goyer’s name in the credits as a producer, so there is a distant connection to the greatest vampire movie that ever has been or will be made. So I was ready for this thing to really rip. And then it didn’t really, and I went on with my life, but here’s my review.

Hawkins (Justin Long, still not thought of as a horror guy even though he’s in JEEPERS CREEPERS, DRAG ME TO HELL, TUSK, BARBARIAN and COYOTES) is an LAPD officer who’s about to join the titular gang-like police task force. For the initiation they make him shoot a young Piru Blood named Primo (Zuri Reed, 2 episodes of The Get Down). At the time she’s with a guy named Wazi (RJ Cyler, POWER RANGERS, THE HARDER THEY FALL), who manages to escape.

The only clue to the witness’s identity is that he had a tag on his bike that said “CRIPBOI.” Hawkins asks his partner Xavier (Jermaine Fowler, STING, EENIE MEANIE) if it rings a bell, because he’s a former Crip. Xavier doesn’t let on, but Wazi is his younger brother.

Yeah, Wazi was seeing a girl from a rival gang. He was trying to get her to move away with him so they didn’t have to hide it. Now he has to go tell her scary brother Bornelius (rapper Freddie Gibbs) that she’s dead. There’s a strange, sometimes kinda funny joke that Bornelius and his crew (which includes rapper YG and producer/ASH director Flying Lotus) are space cases who attribute everything to lizard man cabals and weird mystical shit (“conspiriacracies,” Wazi calls them, though otherwise he’s never depicted as a dummy who doesn’t know words). When they find Primo’s body in pieces they sense “residual satanic energy floating all through this motherfucker” and decide she was killed by a demon.

Of course they’re kind of right. The Night Patrol are secretly vampires who just go around killing people, drinking their blood and blaming it on gang violence. I’m primed to like a movie that uses genre to illustrate the reality that police get away with all kinds of shit by sometimes doing it to criminals and then lumping everybody else in with those criminals. And before he knows the truth about them it’s not lost on Xavier that his less accomplished white partner is the one to get recruited. The patrol has a “Sarge” in the shadows played by Dermot Mulroney (SUNSET), but we mostly see them led by “Deputy,” played by CM Punk (credited as Phil Brooks). I know a little bit about him as a wrestler but I mostly know him from GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR, and I think he works well for this type of macho asshole role, a cop who loves calling young Black men “homeboy.”

There’s also an observant detail in that the captain (Nick Gillie, “Dunkin Donuts Customer,” JACK AND JILL) is the first cop we see, forcing a seriously injured Mazi to sign a false murder confession in a flash forward, but he turns out to not be a vampire. He’s just a cop who’s bought into the way they do things. “Vampires were in LAPD long before I got here,” he says. “They’re still cops.”

Fowler sometimes falls back on his instincts as a comedian to the detriment of some of the drama, but his banter with Long is pretty good (there’s a random b-action reference I obviously enjoyed) and I think he’s more successful with the serious side of the character, who’s stuck between his career as a cop, his loyalty to a questionable partner, and his duty to his estranged family. But that largely means interacting with his mother Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux, THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS), an absurd character conflating the stereotypes of a gangster, a Black militant and a witch doctor. During a confrontation she point blank executes a (non-vampire) cop and then joins a gang in stomping on her own son. I think this is meant as an anti-establishment movie, but I don’t think they’d change her character much if it was a Daily Wire production.

At least the magic thing doesn’t come out of nowhere. In the opening, Wazi accidentally saves himself with a ring his mom gave him. They needed a Van Helsing character to explain how to fight the supernatural and I guess already giving that to all of the Bloods wasn’t enough.

There’s a twist where (spoiler) Hawkins is actually joining Night Patrol because he thinks they were involved in the death of his father and wants to get to the bottom of it, and after that reveal he behaves more sympathetically, even trying to fight against his (double spoiler) vampirism. It really kinda seems like we’re supposed to forgive him for having executed an innocent young woman to get in. But even so, when he bullied free food from a taco stand and then told them they “taste like rat meat and jizz” it wasn’t part of his revenge mission. It was just his personality.

To me this kinda feels like the script for like a ‘90s Full Moon Picture or LEPRECHAUN sequel. Something you’d expect to be crude and clueless about what it’s depicting and you’d get a laugh about it. I think the fact that it looks good, has a legit cast and an edge of social commentary works against it because it gives us enough of a taste of what it could’ve felt like to be a great movie that I can’t help but regret that it’s not.

Man, I wouldn’t know but to me, as a viewer, this all felt very inauthentic – the portrayal of cops, the portrayal of Bloods and Crips, the idea of a cop who was a Crip and references that all the time, the dialogue in general. One tiny example: Deputy tastes some blood and says, “There’s that fear. That fear makes the blood go down smoother than buttermilk.” Punk has a good screen presence and confidence, but not enough to make me believe him talking about drinking buttermlik as if it’s a common reference in 2026. That’s a nitpick, but we get that kind of thing over and over again.

Yes, it’s a vampire movie, but that supernatural element is obviously meant to be grounded in a gritty reality of street life, and I think that could make for a good movie. I won’t make judgments or assumptions of the filmmakers and their backgrounds, but this does not feel like it comes either from lived experience, or disciplined research, or hell, even seeing enough movies about it. It just feels phony to me. I’m not sold. And I realized afterwards that this same director did a movie called LOWLIFE that I felt the same about and didn’t get very far into. (That one has many fans, though.)

That director’s name is Ryan Prows, and he shares screenplay credit with Shaye Ogbonna (The Chi) & Tim Cairo (OFF RAMP) & Jake Gibson (HE BLED NEON). They’re a team who also did LOWLIFE and other projects together. LOWLIFE at least is generally well liked by people who have actually watched the whole thing, so don’t let me scare you off.