30 Days of Night
By Jason Revill
There is something to be said for slipping into a dark theater to watch a good horror film on a chilly and rainy fall day. So you can imagine how pleased I was to find our drought and heat wave broke right as I was deciding to see 30 Days of Night. This may not be the best horror movie I’ve seen, but with this being the season for all things scary, it will definitely do in a pinch.
As Eben Olsen, Josh Hartnett is the sheriff of Barrow, Alaska where every winter for thirty days the town is covered in darkness. A good portion of the town leaves, but many stay, while others including Eben’s estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) are trapped as all routes in or out close down. While everyone prepares to hunker down, there are a couple odd discoveries including burned cell phones and dead sled dogs. Once the always enjoyable Ben Foster shows up as a mysterious stranger spouting ominous warnings, Eben knows something is up. What Eben doesn’t know nor is he able to fully prepare for is that the stranger is only the harbinger for a group of vampires who plan to spend the next thirty days bleeding the town dry.
There are some fantastic action scenes in 30 Days of Night that may not be the most original thing I’ve ever seen, but are certainly entertaining. Specifically, I enjoy how people randomly get snatched off into the darkness never to be seen again, while their loved ones can only watch in horror and disbelief. I also appreciate the homage to Salem’s Lot, one of my personal favorite vampire films, with monsters jumping through kitchen windows to drag off family members.
Now I have to admit as much as I like these bits of action and the multiple decapitations, including one particularly excessive one towards the end of the film (other than Danny Huston’s Marlow) the vampires themselves got to where they were not only not scary, but their shrill screech was down right annoying. Sort of like that noise the ghost makes in The Grudge where at first you find it kind of creepy, but by half way through the film you’re thinking “Alright, I get it. Just stop it.” Andrew Stehlin is by far the worst offender in the bad vampire acting book. I’m not sure why they don’t all behave more like Marlow, but watching Stehlin stalk around just comes off as a bad actor really enjoying pretending to be a badass vampire.
The main disappointment that I have about this film is that it in no way seems like there were thirty days of night. If it weren’t for the film’s title and the fact that everyone is talking about it early on, you would have no idea that this movie was supposed to take place over a month. Josh Hartnett’s growth of wispy facial hair and the snow that doesn’t ever really seem to accumulate don’t help to effectively show the passage of time. What I was expecting was essentially a hard fought battle of humans versus vampires, that was as much about attrition as sheer force. Instead the whole film feels like everyone has just been hiding out for a couple days and you almost can’t help but wonder why they don’t just hide out for a couple more. If the desperately slow ticking of the clock had been conveyed better, the vampires using townsfolk as bait and the film’s climax would have most likely carried more emotional weight.
It’s not as though 30 Days of Night is a bad movie it’s just one that could have obviously been far better with just a little more effort and a more adept director. David Slade (whose previous film Hard Candy I didn’t care for) makes one highly stylized, but ultimately disappointing modern horror film in the vein of the superior 28 Days Later. There’s plenty of blood, but those who are fans of gore as I am, the final twenty minutes is just what you’ll be looking for. It may not be great, but if you want to go to the movies on Halloween, this is not a bad bet and is certainly better than whatever Saw movie is coming out.
The Grade
- Story: B
- Acting: B
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B
- Enjoyability: B-
- Overall: B
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