30 Days of Shi...e

Rating: 2/10 (4 December 2007)

The premise is cool: A remote Alaskan town has 30 days without any sunlight - '30 Days of Night.' A group of vampires come to town to take advantage of this. Eventually, we follow a small group of survivors as they try and stay alive until the 30 days are up. However, the cool premise is taken away by the fact that the filmmakers have no idea how to handle it. It may as well have been called '3 or 4 Days of Night' since we keep lurching forward in time with hardly anything changing for any of the characters.
The film is bad because it simply has its priorities wrong. Its main priorities are: sick gore (a blunt axe takes about 6 swings to chop a head off), and people hiding from the vampires. What it isn't concerned with: people battling vampires to stay alive. The vampires are cool, no question. They dress in dark clothing, look fantastically warped, screech and speak a strange language. The main problem is that they are so much stronger than the humans. The vampires can do anything. Watch them stop speeding cars, run faster than the eye can see, take bullets and keep on coming .... therefore, any confrontation with the humans can only end one way - with the humans being overwhelmed and killed as brutally and bloodily as possible. So the main action of the film is hiding from the vampires, and trying to avoid them until the 30 days are up, rather than trying to take them down.
These problems along with a complete lack of logic by the characters sink the film. This is best summed up when about 3/4 of the way into the film, a character leads all the vampires to a house, where he grabs an inspired weapon to use against them. The weapon works beautifully and then he doesn't even try to use it again!!! On top of this, people hide out for days and nobody needs to eat so much as a sandwich. 6 people dash through the streets to another location with one axe between them. Nobody even thinks to grab a plank of wood or even a frying pan? I know horror-film characters make dumb decisions but that's only good when its part of the fun. This film seems all too willing to just throw out consistency and common sense whenever it is mildly convenient or for no reason whatsoever.
'30 Days of Night' - Its a Very Long Period. Pun Intended. Blood people, geddit?!