A wry Megan Fox cameo is just one pleasure in the Netflix vampire movie Night Teeth

Looking for a leg up in the world, aspiring producer and artist Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) takes over his older brother Jay’s chauffeur gig for the evening. It makes sense, as Jay (Raúl Castillo) has some heavy shit he’s dealing with and not talking about. So Benny finds himself tending to the social needs of party girls Zoe (Lucy Fry, with Cara Delevingne eyebrows and a mid-’90s UK shit-kicker vibe) and Blaire (Debby Ryan, with good girl undertones and a wry sense of humor). They’ve got a series of hot events to hit all over Los Angeles. Catch is, they have to do it all by sunrise. One guess as to why.

Can Benny, implicated in the longstanding conflict between human and bloodsucker, keep the balance of Los Angeles in place while also fulfilling his professional duties? The backstory of this ancient rivalry, as well as the truce that enables L.A. to proceed as an organized nexus of criminal activity, is told as art on the hoods of cars and on the sides of vans in the film’s majestic opening sequence. It’s an inventive choice that sets up a vibe that Adam Randall’s Night Teeth mostly maintains: epic vampire-fiction lore melded with the street art of humanity in the now. Add in the structure of a one-crazy-night picaresque like After Hours or Quick Change, and the mechanics of mob war art (encompassing smartphone video games and Johnnie To epics), and you’ve got the basics of this enjoyable but not quite exceptional genre hybrid.

The cast is generally charming, even if some of the more prominent names get just one superbly art-directed scene before we’re back to the GPS and on to the next locale. These cameoing guest stars make the most of their screen time: Alexander Ludwig’s pansexual surfer vamp Rocko, who’s like some undead variation on a Steve Zahn or Wyatt Russell type, deserves his own spinoff. And Megan Fox makes an impression in lingerie and a jeweled shawl, adopting the perfect jaded tone as though she were auditioning for the role of Selene Gallio whenever the MCU decides to bring in the X-Men. These pop-up mid-bosses are way more fun than the rest of the film, though we also get Alfie Allen as the vampire Big Bad, another example of the pasty parasitism that’s become a global go-to routine for Game Of Thrones alumni.

Night Teeth has a lush visual sensibility, finding aspects of Los Angeles we haven’t seen countless times in movies and television. The party mansion of Gio (Mad Men’s Bryan Batt), one of the vamp crime bosses, is Caligula gilt surrounded by a field of luminescent red flowers—an organic swath of LEDs that sticks in the back of the viewer’s mind, in its way as reassuring as the home Benny, Jay, and their grandmother share. And first-time screenwriter Brent Dillon’s script excels at the little details of social structure, human and vampire, that distinguish Night Teeth from other politically minded genre picks.

At heart, this is a West Coast companion to last year’s similarly enjoyable Vampires Vs. The Bronx, though that film had more of a specific political perspective—as well as a more diverse coalition of neighborhood folk fighting off the unholy menace. (We’re never let in on why exactly it’s only the Latinx community that holds Angeleno vampires at bay.) It’s clear where Night Teeth is headed from fairly early on, and there aren’t a lot of surprises along the way. But the film fulfills its obligations with style, even if it never matches the ambitious flourish of its opening sequence.