Just drink your blood and shut up!

Rating: 6/10 (5 November 2007)

It is with day-glo irony that one character in "30 Days of Night" makes an offhand reference to cinema's penultimate bloodsucking actor, Bela Lugosi. While the original Universal "Dracula" remains the cornerstone of cinematic vampire lore, the way of the mythic creatures has gone into hyperdrive in the last few years, most visibly in the "Underworld" series. Yes, it seems that vampires just aren't that interesting anymore, unless they're screeching, howling, hurtling through the air at great speed, and outfitted with the latest in repulsive denture prosthetics.
Director David Slade, who began his career directing music videos before graduating to features with last year's overrated "Hard Candy," does an impressive job establishing a bleak visual tone in the small community of Barrow, Alaska. Throughout the movie, the chilly atmosphere was so convincing it kept an ice-cold grip on my spinenot since John Carpenter's "The Thing" has isolation been established with such bone-chilling desperation.
"30 Days"attempts an alchemy on a stagnant movie monster with only marginal success, since the script (co-written by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, and Brian Nelson) really isn't up to snuff. We get a few main characters who are defined just enough (in admittedly cliché parts) to earn our sympathy, followed by maybe a dozen supporting characters who exist A) solely to be picked off; or B) recite monologues we couldn't possibly care about before getting picked off. A big no-no in horror films is trying to give bit players depth when their demise is nigh. In the meantime, a lot of the humans' actions are Fright Film 101 stuff, running the gambit from simple clichés (at least half the movie is spent asking who/what the vampires are) to the idiotic (grandfather flees hiding place, possibly blowing the other survivors' cover; grandson dutifully follows after, yelling after gramps). Similar territory was covered more intelligently, and with a keener awareness of genre convention, in Carpenter's "Thing."
While Slade is very good at establishing setting and mood, his choices in technique can be jarring. There are at least a half-dozen cuts away from (and into) action that is given no specific setting, nor any real setup (an early "home invasion" scene that seemingly comes out of nowhere is a good example). Also indicative of the past decade of horror is an over-reliance on chaotic, "Saving Private Ryan"-style edits whenever a vamp attacks, which is more disorienting than exciting.
Now, I grant you, all of these qualms could very well be peripheral if the movie delivers on its blood-sucking baddies, but "30 Days"' most glaring misstep (and it is pure, graphic-novel flaw) is in turning our gang of black-suited vamps into periodic philosophers who strut around like smug Goth kids with blood on their chins. Every time fang-king Marlow (Danny Huston) paused to deliver a subtitled line in his guttural vampire-language, I nearly rolled my eyes in disbelief. I kept thinking, "You're ruining itjust suck your blood and shut up!" The other vamps screech and howl and get the requisite "snarling close-ups" as they feast on some poor sucker's neck. Ho hum.
While Josh Hartnett and Melissa George do an admirable job of propping up their underwritten roles (they're an estranged couple, and you know the rest), their efforts, combined with Slade's eye for visuals, cannot raise "30 Days" to the level of a modern vampire classic. No matter how it's presented, a plot about vaguely-defined characters holing up in buildings for an indefinite period is nothing new. Which is a shame, since "30 Days" clearly had the potential to set a new genre benchmark.
5.5 out of 10