Rated R
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny
Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Boone Junior
Directed by: David Slade
Tagline: They’re coming!
Running time: 113 Minutes
Blu-ray
Quick summary (from IMDB):
After an Alaskan town is plunged into darkness for a month, it is attacked by a
bloodthirsty gang of vampires.
We probably aren’t going
to get to more than four Vampire movies for our self-declared Vampire Movie
Month of May. Having only made it through three movies as of the 20th.
This was actually our second attempt at 30 Days of Night, after the first disc
had a crack in it and wouldn’t play and had to go back to Netflix. The other
problem is that there aren’t that many vampire movies out there that my wife
and I both genuinely want to see. She won’t be down with the Blade movies, or
Dracula: Dead and Loving it, and neither of us are particularly excited to see
the final Twilight movie, we’re only watching it at this point for closure/to
see how bad it can get. Of the Vampire movies I put in the queue for us, 30
Days of Night was, by far, the most intriguing, as it didn’t deal with your
traditional, suave and sexy vampires, these were more like monsters, and a
little scarier than Dracula and the like.
I really like the idea behind
this movie, and the comic book it was based upon, but the movie itself wasn’t
all that great. Taking vampires, who traditionally have a fixed daily schedule
of being out of the way before sun up and giving them free reign for 30
straight days sounds terrifying and promising, but something was lost along the
way. The vampires weren’t that scary, looking more like inbred monsters than
anything else. They could move really fast and jump high, but mostly they just
walked around, waiting for people to panic. They spoke a weird, primitive
language and screeched a lot. I never felt scared or terrified by anything that
the vampires were doing.
The most terrifying or
creepy part of the entire movie was anytime that Ben Foster was on screen, and
anytime he opened his mouth. The voice he used, coupled with the things he was
saying and his general insane creepiness made him the most effective and
intriguing character in the entire movie. He was mysterious and weird, and I
wanted more of him and less of Josh Hartnett and his wife. He was by far the
most interesting character in the movie, more so than any of the vampires.
Even though it was a
somewhat refreshing take on the vampire genre, it was still a pretty
predictable movie. You see a couple of cool looking machines early on, and you
just know they’re going to come in handy for killing vampires later on (first
on that tractor-saw hybrid and then the trash compactor in the utilodor or
whatever it was). And they do away with some of the other vampire lore, like
garlic and mirrors and some steaks through the heart, and there are really only
two surefire ways to get rid of them, beheading and the sun. And the sun is not
very reliable north of the Arctic
Circle .
Of the three vampire
movies we’ve watched this month, 30 Days of Night is the only one I would categorize
as horror, though it wasn’t all that horrifying. I liked it a little bit more
than I did Interview with the Vampire, if only because it was less boring and
less whiny. And I found the concept interesting, but just wish they hadn’t made
the vampires so boring or focused on the sheriff-wife relationship as much.
It’s a vampire movie, just focus on the gory stuff.
2 out of 5 stars
Trailer:
