Daylight’s End is the latest film from director William Kaufman, whose previous projects include Jarhead 3: The Siege and The Marine 4: Moving Target. You remember The Marine, right? That modest success starring WWE superstar John Cena? Well, there are 4 of them now (with a 5th on the way) and they star “The Miz”. Despite initial impressions, however, most of Kaufman’s work seems to have garnered middling to positive reviews, presumably from those ravenous action junkies that just finished The Marine 3 and were somehow left unsatiated. Kaufman seems like the sort of guy that takes a budget that could barely finance a student film and produces competent work that fans of the genre seem to genuinely enjoy.

I could end the review for Daylight’s End there really, it serves as good a summary of what this movie is as anything could. This is not a horror movie, more an action film with horror trappings akin to a Resident Evil film. Action is not only the genre in which this film belongs, but also where it truly excels. The cinematography is clean and never employs “shaky-cam” or visual confusion to try to make up for subpar choreography. A highlight of the film, the fight choreography was crafted by a team of 11 people under the supervision of Ron Balicki, a 23-year veteran stunt choreographer with a career going back to The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

Daylight’s End is the story of Rourke, a Mad Max-style badass with one name and zero fucks left to give, as he makes his way across the eastern seaboard, mowing down hordes of vampires along the way. Rourke is played by Johnny Strong, who has appeared in such prominent films as Black Hawk Down and The Fast and the Furious. Rarely has a name so perfectly suited its owner, with a jawline that could cut glass and a physique that would make a Skarsgård envious, Strong is the prototypical lone wolf action hero. He’s the real deal as well, having experience with multiple martial arts and holding a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, skills that really make you believe that he can handle himself in some of the incredibly perilous positions he finds himself in. A true renaissance man, Strong also plays multiple instruments with his band, Operator, and provided the music for this film.

We open onto a barren desert road, an old armored muscle car roaming the earth looking for god knows what, when our silent hero gets out, assault rifle in one hand wearing a face mask and a pair of shades that look straight out of Blade. He walks into an abandoned gas station and hears some strange noises coming from a freezer inside the building. He then proceeds to hook the freezer up to his car and drags it out into the open, revealing a pathetic creature-black and sizzling from the sun’s rays while Rourke watches apathetically as it withers and dies. This scene sets the pace for what is to come along with calling attention to some of the film’s limitations. To put it bluntly, the CGI is roughly on par with a SyFy-original movie and the makeup isn’t much better. Our immolating vampire (the movie never calls them that, but they burn in the sun so they’re vampires) looks more like she just had a mud bath and is exiting a steaming sauna.

That’s not to say that the visuals are without their charm, the cinematography is downright ambitious at points and there are some impressive wide shots of lovingly-crafted desolation. There is a grittiness to the visuals, a faux grain and subtle vignetting which suggest they were going for the look of film, but the sometimes overbearing contrast and sterility of the film’s palette betray its digital origins. It’s not a bad film to look at, they made the smart choice of not abandoning color in the pursuit of that gritty, dystopian aesthetic, but you get the sense they were fighting with the limitations of their budget.

While looking for supplies, Rourke comes upon a group of survivors who stop to help a deranged woman in the road when they’re ambushed by a group of bandits they call marauders. In a scene that is sure to draw some controversy, the survivors are killed down to the last woman, who is on the brink of being sexually assaulted before she’s rescued by Rourke. Something of a cheap trope that is employed here for it’s easy appeal to our expectations regarding damsels in distress needing valiant white knights to rescue them. After her rescue, the remaining survivor Sam (Chelsea Edmundson) tells Rourke he should return to their safe house, an offer he begrudgingly accepts in exchange for the promise of fuel and weapons. Under the encroaching threat of a day for night filter, they make it back just before the vampires overrun the city. The survivors it turns out are pretty well-stocked, having taken up shelter in an abandoned jailhouse and outfitted themselves with enough automatic weapons and body armor for a small militia. As you might expect, not everyone is immediately ready to trust this newcomer to their group and this starts to create divisions in the established hierarchy. This human drama makes up most of the second act of the film and while it isn’t completely fumbled, it quickly becomes apparent this sort of thing doesn’t come easily to Kaufman or his frequent collaborator, writer Chad Law.

The leader of the group is Frank Hill, (Lance Henriksen) a tough but fair police chief that seems to be the only thing keeping the group from imploding in on itself. Henriksen isn’t phoning it in here and is believable in his role as the curmudgeonly patriarch, but you do get the sense that this is a character he could play in his sleep. This is true for the rest of the cast as well, who rarely rise to any great heights dramatically, as the script never really affords them the opportunity to escape their tropes. The rest of the survivors range from vaguely sympathetic to mostly forgettable, really only noteworthy in an archetypal sense and not for their individual narratives. As Rourke begins to prove himself to the group, he starts to attract more people to his confrontational style of taking the fight to the enemy as opposed to Frank’s more defensive approach that seeks to preserve the lives of the survivors, even if he doesn’t really have an end goal in mind.

This sets the stage for the final act, which ends up being a 30-minute action sequence. I’m admittedly not the biggest action movie fan-I saw Fury Road and that kind of filled my action quota for the next couple of years-so your mileage may vary, but there isn’t much to say about the climax really. It’s all shot and choreographed well, Strong gets a few opportunities to do some real acting as he becomes more caught up in the lives and dreams of the fellow survivors, but it does feel like they ran out of steam on the storytelling front and chose to fall back into their action comfort zone.

I enjoyed Daylight’s End, and if this sounds like your sort of movie you’ll probably like it more than I did. I was easily as entertained as I would be watching your average Resident Evil or Underworld movie, and those had much higher budgets and far more people behind them. Kaufman has once again taken on limitations that for most directors would result in direct-to-DVD schlock and has produced a completely watchable and even exciting experience that is perfectly suited for those nights where you just want to have a beer and watch some monsters get their heads blown off.