Nightwatch

As expected, the women are all shape shifters. You do meet a shapeshifting guy at some point, but you never watch him shift. Is this fear of the naked male body again?

Dunno (OK, to be fair, the “good” women are shapeshifters, and the “bad” women are vampires, and the only other woman in the show is the McGuffin. And a lot of the “bad” guys are vampires, too, but because there are so many more guy characters than women characters, they get to have a greater variety of skills. Whereas women are just.. shapeshifters and vampires. I mean, couldn’t you have a vampire, a seer, a shapeshifter and some kind of shooting-flames-from-eye-sockets power woman?).

Highlight of the movie: when the main kid sits and watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer on tv while carving kitchen utensils into pointy stakes.

This wasn’t the movie I thought it was. I assumed it was going to be some sort of creepy ghosty show, based on the trailer I saw. Instead, it’s a showdown between good and evil, where everybody has a superpower. A sort of X-men lite.

Also, the pseudo-climax is resolved pretty easily, with no real action on the part of the protagonist, at which point you realize that whole part of the plot was just a McGuffin that gets us to the place where his son has to choose between good and evil, and his part in doing that (though his part in doing that comes at the beginning of the movie, so again, his choices, the outcome, has already been made. Sort of tensionless then, really).

I might be interested in seeing the rest, maybe. It’s the first in a trilogy. But… well, though I do sorta like some of the characters, I don’t love any of them, and if you’re going to invest that much time in a series, you generally have to love the people and really care what’s going to happen to them.

And, mostly, I didn’t really.

Though it was cool that the shapeshifting chick got to battle it out in armor in the opening bit.

Hey, I take what I can get.

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