30 Days of Night is about to open nationwide, and more than likely it will be the number one movie at the box office once the weekend concludes. Its only real competition will be either Gone Baby Gone or Rendition. The problems with these two films are that Gone Baby Gone, for all its serious subject matter of child abduc-tion, looks like it could be a serious downer and Rendition deals with a post-9/11 analysis of our politics which audiences still don't feel comfortable viewing on the big screen, six years after the fact(note the underwhelming performance of the excellent The King-dom). So 30 Days will by default come out on top.
Not that it deserves to.
30 Days of Night, based upon the original comic book and its sequels of the same name, is not an overwhelmingly bad movie... but its director, David Slade(Hard Candy), unintentionally reveals several flaws within the film which amply demonstrate the difficulty of transferring the imagery and ideas of comics to the cinema.
The basic story is as such: The town of Barrow, Alaska has a population just above 400 folks, many of whom migrate to warmer climes come the winter, leaving a little over 150 stalwarts behind. For one month in winter, the sun sets and does not rise for 30 days(in reality, the actual Barrow doesn't receive light from November until January). On this one particular month, a group of nocturnally inclined visitors come to town...vampires, intent on having their fill of the warm blood the inhabitants have to offer. The townsfolk, upon realizing the evil within their midst, must do their best to survive the month until sunrise arrives once again to save them all.
It's actually a very exciting premise, but one which instantly begins to fall apart once the casting is considered. Josh Hartnett(Resurrecting the Champ) plays sheriff Eben Oleson with Manu Bennett(The Condemned) as his deputy. From the outset, Hartnett, who isn't even 30 yet, just seems too young to be the sheriff of this isolated town, while Bennett seems like he would be perfect for the role. The problem is that Hollywood now panders to the twenty-something crowd, when once upon a time directors and producers were bold enough to cast actors who looked like the roles they needed to portray, and would also guarantee a solid performance. Hartnett actually does a good job, and based on his performance here--and moreso on the strength of his last role in Resurrecting the Champ--I'm slowly gaining a newfound respect for his abilities. However, it's a strange and jarring thing to see him in this role, which continually took me out of the movie...much like the casting of Gary Sinise as Stu Redman in 1994's Stephen King's The Stand, when there was an unnamed extra in an opening scene right next to Sinise who looked like he was the Redman character, plucked straight from the book.
This was a minor quibble however, compared to other things which happen in the film. To some degree, all vampire movies borrow from the granddaddy of them all, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and 30 Days is certainly no exception. Much like that novel's lost Demeter, which washes ashore in London with a missing crew, a mysterious tanker comes to rest just off the Alaskan coast one morning, and a mysterious stranger(3:10 to Yuma's Ben Foster, credited only as "The Stranger") makes his way into the town, undetected by all. Soon after, reports of some serious vandalism begin to emerge: several cell phones are stolen and set afire(although director Slade never tells us whose cell phones they are, how they were swiped, or whether they are the total of all the cells in the town). All the dogs kept in the town's kennels are butchered(but like most vampire films, the issue as to why is never explained. Answer: dogs are capable of sniffing out vampire hiding places, serve as early warning alarms of a type, and have no fear of the Undead).
The Stranger is eventually apprehended by Oleson and his estranged wife Stella(Melissa George), who works with the fire department but carries a piece. They take him back to the station-house, and place him under guard of Eben's mother(?!) and teen-age brother Jake(Mark Rendall) while the duo proceed to investi-gate some of the weird goings-on which are happening, particularly at the power plant, since the lights have suddenly gone out and the backup generators have switched on. There is a very cool scene where Eben discovers a head on a pike and begins to quietly freak out, but once he and Stella head off to find out what happened to the power, they bring their range rover to a halt and get out because something obscured by the snow is going on up ahead. Stella uses her binoculars to see what it is, and upon doing so, instantly tells Eben to get back in the rover and take off. As they drive, they are set upon by one of the vampires who attempts to break into their vehicle. They manage to shake him off, Eben shouting to Stella "What the hell was that?"--and Stella never tells him what she saw, nor does director Slade ever reveal it to the audience!
Part of the problem with 30 Days of Night, aside from the fact that the movie spends a portion of its time dealing with the broken relationship between Stella and Eben(yet again, Slade declines to reveal why they are split up), its reels unspool bereft of much logic. The characters as written are so immensely stupid--making stupid mistakes and unnecessarily putting themselves at risk while knowing what they're up against--that you actually begin to root for the vampires to kill them all! And trust me, the vampires aren't much brighter than the dumbasses they're hunting. While the town is isolated, it's also very small. Somehow the remaining survivors of the initial bloodbath manage to hole up in a hidden attic for at least a week, but the vampires don't really actively seek out their prey. The town is small enough for a door-to-door search, but the Undead have apparently become quite lazy over the centuries.
Their leader Marlow(Danny Huston)--whose name is not the same as in the comics, and is in fact a ripoff of the Barlow name in Stephen King's Salem's Lot--chooses instead to hold onto a couple of human hostages and send them out one at a time as bait, hoping that any survivors holed up will come out to rescue them. Knowing what they're up against, what villager would be stupid enough to do that? Oh, wait--Stella! That's right...in a later scene which makes you automatically slap your hand to your forehead, the last few survivors are on their way to an industrial plant to hole up for the last day of night. A little girl(shot so ambiguously by cinematograph-er Jo Willems that I thought it was a little boy) is forced to head out into the darkened night, and knowing what the risk is, Stella calls out to the child to join the group hiding under a building crawlspace, leading one of the vamps right in their direction!
On the subject of the vampires: they tend to make high-pitched screeching noises...a lot. They screech to call to one another when prey is sensed. They screech when they get wounded. They screech when they're about to rip someone's throat open. It's terri-fying...that is, if we define "terrifying" as "f***ing annoying". Also, will filmmakers stop creating badly garbled "vampire languages" which repeat similar words far too often(few are the human languages which do this) and when listened to closely enough, sound like meaningless gobbledygook? There's a cool scene where Eben uses an ultraviolet light on Marlow's girlfriend Iris, and Megan Franich in her acting debut as the character, acquits herself well, completely selling the agony she is supposed to be in. However, we are only left to assume Iris is Marlow's gal, since she's always in close proximity to him. In the comics, the history of these beings was explained, but director Slade doesn't even pay their origins lip service. Who are these vampires? Where do they come from? What are their names, for goodness sakes! The only way to know who's who among them is by checking the listings on imdb!
There are good things to be found within the movie though, one of them being the subtle performance of Mark Boone Junior(Batman Begins) as burly mountain man Beau Brower. 30 Days is an r-rated horror with plenty of decapitations and other brutality for gore fans, but much like its schizoid mix of terror and soap opera, it can't decide just how much horror should be on display. Vampires are among the most seductive, brutal creatures to ever be intro-duced into human mythology, yet their initial attack on the townsfolk is hardly shown as the cameraman seems to be undergoing five epileptic seizures at once. I don't think any film should push the envelope in terms of visual horror just to push it, but there is a crucial reveal carried out toward the latter half of the film where a viscerally gory shot should have been given to us, but wasn't! It was a critical piece of character development, and Slade's camera shied away at the wrong time. What a waste.
And those last three words may come to embody your feelings as well, upon viewing this film. Or you might feel as several mem-bers of my screening audience did, who remarked aloud as they left, "That sucked!" David Slade has said it was his intention to make "a scary vampire film", since he feels "The rest of them, they fall into all kinds of traps. We're going to try to do our best."
Better luck next time, fella.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
Horror movie...or soap opera?
It would be nice if the director of 30 Days of Night could make up his mind...
30 Days of Night: Not the worst vampire movie ever...but definitely not one of the best.
Josh Hartnett stars as a sheriff completely unprepared for what he finds in the dark night.
Ben Foster as "The Stranger". A few more roles in movies like this, and that could be true.
Sadly, Melissa George's character does not die in the film...and at one point, I so wanted her to.
"Hey, lady...be honest. Do I have garlic on my breath?"
Tiny terror: The debut of Rachel Maitland-Smith as a vampire child is one of the few scenes which actually works.
"Okay, Melissa...we'll hide here while you go out there and do what you do best--be an idiot!"
Cue "Star Trek fight music" and...go! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dah!
