Starring Luke Goss, Bokeem Woodbine, Danny Trejo, Paul Sloan, Chasty Ballesteros, Luciana Faulhaber, Jason Mewes, Jacqueline Lord and Dan Swayze. Written by Paul Sloan and Christian Sesma. Directed by Christian Sesma. Produced by Ryan Noto, Christian Sesma, Elias Axume, Jack Campbell and Tony Piantedosi. 

A small team of bounty hunters, led by Wade (Goss), succeed in apprehending their target, a woman called Mae (Ballesteros), but matters get out of hand when they find themselves under siege in an isolated, deserted motel, fighting against trigger-happy cartel killers. It also slowly becomes apparent that there’s more to Mae than meets the eye… 

Okay, as this is the Monster Zone blog site, I will be upfront and reveal Mae’s secret: she’s actually a vampire! The vampire aspect of the story, though, is used more to add some mystery to the mainly action-oriented movie. Some moments hint that Mae is not just a ‘normal’ foxy asian (pole dancing) gal, but this supernatural facet of the tale remains secondary to the central tough-bounty-hunters-shooting-it-out-with-cartel-thugs siege plot line. But, hey, this is all right by me because the combat scenes are pretty intense and well-handled, with bodies getting blasted, knife fights, and rocket launchers used with relish by the combatants.     

THE NIGHT CREW is actually a modestly-budgeted production, but it benefits from director Christian Sesma’s quest to try and put every dollar he has on the screen. Sesma has said that his mindset is always to make his films as if he had a hundred million dollars (even though, with some of his projects, he often only has several hundred thousand dollars to play with!) Sesma has admitted that this attitude has been called overly ambitious a lot of times by critics, but at least he has managed to give many of his low cost movies (such as his heist film PAY DIRT) a sense of scale by shooting some of his movies near his home in the Coachella Valley, making the most of local locations like Thermal, Palm Springs and the Salton Sea, using the desert vistas, stunning blue skies and expansive palm groves to turbo-charge the visual appeal of his thrillers, revenge stories and actioners. For THE NIGHT CREW Sesma bases the movie in and around a real, derelict desert motel complex (which, in reality, was situated twenty minutes from the director’s house). With the abandoned motel location dressed up with trash bags and some of its walls spray-painted a bit, the place was made to look more dilapidated for the movie.

Sesma also gets the best out of Luke Goss, who plays the lead bounty hunter. I think Goss, when used well (such as by Guillermo Del Toro in HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY), delivers compelling performances, and here he takes his Wade role seriously.

Bokeem Woodbine, Paul Sloan and Luciana Faulhaber, meanwhile, are fine as the rest of Wade’s team, Danny Trejo’s baddie Aguilar is very much the kind of big, grizzled guest star thug that Trejo can play in his sleep, and Jason Mewes, as usual, finds it hard to shake off comparisons to his Jay and Silent Bob character.     

After all the shootings, grapplings, stabbings, kickings, punchings and deaths, the mortally-wounded Rose and Wade (spoiler) are turned into vampires to keep them ‘alive’. Then they, along with Mae, go over to Aguilar’s place, where the cartel boss sprouts some vampire fangs of his own.

These blood-sucking vampire elements only become a main part of the story at the very end of the film, and it is obvious that Sesma was hoping to springboard these characters into a more supernatural-themed sequel. I, for one, would’ve loved to have seen Luke Goss play a kick-ass vampire bounty hunter in a follow-up flick.

After Sesma sold his movie, however, he was then in the hands of the distributors, and, according to the director, a weird distributor put the movie out at a weird time – and THE NIGHT CREW just kind of fell by the wayside, meaning there was no appetite for a sequel. Which, for me, is a pity, as I think, with a bigger budget and an action-horror plot focusing on vamp bounty hunters, THE NIGHT CREW 2 would’ve been a bloody fangtastic flick!

Let’s end with a look at the Brazilan DVD cover artwork for the film…