Conventional Vampire Flick with a Few Twists

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2009)

There's nothing new about this vampire film. It's your basic vampire/zombie film about a group of townspeople making that familiar last stand with the usual bittersweet ending. But this was what we came here for, wasn't it?
Anyway, sure, these vampire/zombie films have been done before many times, but I'm a sucker for them and can probably see many more for years to come. Still, this film could've been done better.
First of all, it just took too long to see the vampires. We have to wait about 30 minutes of setup and dialog to get to them. Now, we all know this is a vampire movie and if you're gonna keep us waiting to see them, there'd better be a good reason. And there wasn't. All that waiting and listening to dialog was just to describe a background that was clear from the start and to develop characters who we ended up not caring much about anyway.
But once the vampires showed up, things got more interesting. Visually, anyway. Otherwise it's just the usual monsters running amok killing everyone. It was just cool to see heads being decapitated. I don't think I've ever seen so many heads being cut off in such graphic detail in one film. Pretty neat. But it could've been gorier had the wood chipper been used more. It was shown early in the film as if it was going figure prominently in the ending, but, unfortunately, it didn't.
The editing of this film was strange. Or perhaps it was the direction. People would just appear or disappear without much explanation. It was like in one scene someone was wondering "what happened to so-and-so" and in the next scene that so-and-so simply just reappeared without explanation of what happened in between. Then there was this other scene where the sheriff and his friend had to break from the group to look for another hideout. They struggled to get there as they fought vampires along the way, but they finally succeeded. And in the next scene we saw the rest of the group just appear in the new hideout. They were just sitting there calmly as if they had found safer path or had just been teleported somehow. Pretty odd.
The ending was a conventional vampire movie ending, but with an interesting twist.
As vampire movies go, despite the slow start, odd dialog, characters I didn't care much about and some strange editing choices, this film had enough gore and suspense and an interesting ending to keep me entertained.