- Director: Jason Krawczyk
- Writer: Jason Krawczyk
- Stars: Henry Rollins, Booboo Stewart, Kate Greenhouse
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
Synopsis
Jack wakes up, as there’s someone knocking on his door. We see he has two long scars on his back. It’s the landlady, and she wants her money. He takes a couple of hundred-dollar-bills out of a trunk full of money to pay her. He goes to church and afterwards meets up with a hospital intern who sells him something in a package. Jack puts the package in his otherwise-empty refrigerator. Every time Jack stops moving, we hear sounds of war and death. PTSD?
Two men come to his door, and he punches one of them. They break in and threaten Jack. One of them shoots Jack in the hand. He gets violently badass with them and tosses them back into the hallway. He goes to the diner and orders oatmeal. The waitress clearly wants him to ask her out, but he’s not having any of that. In fact, he is having some kind of memory issue.
He gets a call from his ex, who wants him to pick up their daughter at a nearby bar. They go back to the diner. He explains to her that he doesn’t eat meat; nothing with blood in it. That evening, he gets home, and his hand has healed.
The next day, he goes to buy from his intern again, but the two goons are there to kidnap and torture the guy. Jack tears a mailman out of his truck and follows them. He messes them up a lot more seriously than the first time. He and his daughter Andrea then go to Bingo at the local church; it keeps him occupied. Between bingo and the diner, Jack doesn’t do very much.
They go back to the diner and Andrea invites Cara the waitress to go to bingo tomorrow night. While no one is looking, someone spikes Jack’s drink and follows him home. Jack goes outside to beat them up as well, but he passes out from the drug. They throw Jack in the river, but that only pisses him off. This time, Jack tears out one guy’s throat and eats it. Maybe he’s a vampire? When he gets home, he insists that Andrea get out of the house. Does he want to eat her?
The neighbor gets in his face, and Jack does something bad to him. He disposes of the body the next morning. As he wanders the city he’s nice to the good people and eats the bad people. Something has got Jack out of his routine.
Jack gets a message on his answering machine that the bad guys have kidnapped Andrea and killed her mother. They want him to come to the docks. He goes to the diner and orders a rare steak. He rescues Cara from her ex-husband, and walks her home, completely forgetting to go to the docks. He doesn’t seem to have a very good memory until Cara asks him what he did for a job, and it turns out to be about everything at one time or another.
He goes home, and we finally see that the package from the intern contained blood. He keeps seeing an old man with a goatee all over town, but he tries to avoid the old man. Jack goes to see Alex, the son of his old boss, and asked if he had anything to do with the kidnapping. Alex says he had nothing to do with it, but Jack can hear crying in the next room.
He goes back to the diner, and Cara is terrified. The place is crawling with goons. One of them shoots him in the head, and that really gets Jack angry. They load the one survivor into Cara’s car, and she watches him pull out the bullets with pliers. They go back to his apartment and she finds a photo of Jack— dated 1914. He explains that he doesn’t know how old he is, but he was Cain from the Bible.
He goes to the hospital to interrogate the injured intern. The intern puts the finger on Alex. Cara accuses Jack of being vampire, and he doesn’t deny it but doesn’t want to talk about it, either. He does say that he’s one of a kind.
He goes back to Alex’s place, releases Andrea, and breaks Alex’s leg. Jack explains to Alex, “I’ve killed nine-year-olds for no reason at all. What makes you think you have a chance?” He gives Alex the full speech.
And then the old man with the goatee comes in, and Alex can’t see him. It’s God, or maybe Death, and Cain/Jack isn’t happy to see him. Then Cara interrupts for more help, and the man is gone.
Commentary
I used to really love Angels & Demons / Heaven & Hell stuff, at least until “Supernatural” ran it all into the ground and made it kinda boring. It also had a lot of the mood of the TV series “Angel” where the vampire tries to fit with modern times, albeit a lot more serious. The artwork for the film shows wings on Jack that make him look like an angel, but it’s definitely not clear what he is for more than half the film.
It’s honestly more of an action-adventure than a horror film, but it is about a vampire, so it’s definitely in the neighborhood. It’s got several really good gore shots, and it never gets boring, even though a lot of it is just talking. The action scenes are really good, and it’s well-acted all around. I definitely liked it a lot. It’s got a lot of fun little details too, like when he eats a guy’s finger and spits out the fingernail afterwards.