Just plain bad

Rating: 3/10 (11 April 2008)

After reading the comments here, I was looking forward to a film which might reignite the sadly neglected genre.
Maybe my expectations were too high, but I was just bored throughout the whole tedious, derivative, cliché ridden mess that was 30 Days Of Night.
I mean, come on! Had these people never seen a horror film? Even in Alaska they have TV! Their reactions, responses and thought processes were like that of a four year old fearing something under the bed.
Cardboard cutout characters behaving like children is no basis for a thrill. I watched in stupefaction as they seemed to make the worst decisions possible (so I lost interest in their survival after a while), and whilst the gore factor was thankfully underplayed, I just couldn't help but side with the vampires. Just kill them and put them out of their misery, for heaven's sake! It ain't rocket science! You can smell them, apparently.
But no. We are privileged enough to have to put our brains on the back burner and accept plot holes that you could fly a Boeing 747 through, a whole host of miserably poor performances which would hardly pass as acting in a junior school drama class, and a denouement that made almost no sense at all. Erm, where did the rest of the vampires go when the sun came up? Just because it's based on a graphic novel (in my mind, this was more like a child's comic book) doesn't mean that it can't be a great film.
Hellboy was a blast. The X-Men films were amusing and amazing. The Batman films were variable, but generally dark and well plotted.
So as you can tell, I didn't like it, and would not recommend it to anyone over the age of 10, or a corresponding IQ.
Cheers, Will