90 Minutes of wtf?......

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2008)

Ho-hum. Given the basic storyline I was hoping for much more from this movie. Sadly it was not to be. Instead, we get pretty much every horror and vampire cliché you might care to think of. By themselves, clichés aren't terrible, but the rest of the movie is so annoying and painful to watch at times that the sum (of its bad parts) outweighs the whole quite completely.
Of particular annoyance was the lack of anything remotely looking like intelligence on the part of either the vampires or their victims. People do stupid things solely so they can be killed in an "entertaining" way by one vampire or another.
And as for the vampires.... Comical is the best way to describe them. They have all the menace of Halloween trick-or-treaters and the dress-sense of an eighties techno-rock band. Add in their kill-kill-kill-we-can't-do-anything-but-kill mentality and they are just the worst kind of farcical parody on the vampire legend that there could be. Plus the apparent lack of being able to do something as simple as wiping the blood from their faces (even after its supposedly been there for the whole month) just turns them into a big joke.
Picture this: You're the leader of a gang of vampires (about thirty or so I reckon) and you've plotted to sail up in the good ship SS Fangster just as a town goes into a sunless period for a month. So....you've got thirty days to desport yourself among the cattle that are the 150 human occupants. So what do you do? You effectively cut off all communications with the outside world.....check! Then you go into the town with your mob and slaughter 95% of the inhabitants on the first night......wait, what? This is what you are dealing with. There is no common sense here. The vampires act idiotically. And after killing most of the inhabitants, and knowing that there are others hiding, what do they do? Instigate a house to house search? Check every conceivable hideaway? No....they simply do very little until one of the humans does something almost as idiotic and draws attention to itself. Then they all rush to the attack mob-handed with their still bloody faces. Christ, even animals clean themselves.
In short, the plot is pretty dumb. There is also no suspense as a result and little in the way of character development.
The film editing also leaves MUCH to be desired. Scenes shift with such alarming rapidity that a bathroom break can (quite literally) mean missing a whole week's worth of the 30 days of the title.
Also, having cut the power to the town, one might imagine more being made of the fact that it's a tad chilly outside. I saw frosty breath (real or CGI'd) only once near the start of the film. And what do the characters do for heat whilst hiding away in the now unheated buildings? All of these things combine to ruin what could have been a good movie. On the plus side, Josh Hartnett's character dies at the end in quite a noble way (if a bit ridiculous) and there was a nice scene with a vampire child going nuts.
Other than that, the movie is an assault on the intellect that really adds nothing to the vampire genre that hasn't already been done, and better, by many other movies. Only the setting distinguishes this film from any other vampire movie and that was woefully underused.
SUMMARY: Plot: Fair. Acting: OK. Stupidity: Off the scale CONCLUSION: If you want to see a horror/monster movie in a frozen setting buy the Thing on DVD.