All that setup, but no payoff

Rating: 5/10 (8 November 2007)

'Slow-burning' horror films, where the audience gets to know and care about the characters before the blood starts flowing, are rare these days. So with 30 Days Of Night taking its time to get started, I thought it might turn out to be something good.
Unfortunately, it just turned out to be slow. The characters are so sketchily drawn that despite all the time spent with them early on, you never get to find out anything interesting about them. Similarly, the '30 days' gimmick is totally wasted - probably half the film takes place on the very first night, then after that the only indication that any time has passed is an on-screen caption and the growth of Josh Hartnett's comedy beard. There's no sense at all that two weeks may have passed between scenes, no cabin fever or paranoia or people cracking up under the strain of hiding out from merciless vampiric killers. All you get are - again - sketches of scenes, leading to someone making a stupid decision to go outside and whoops, another one dead.
The vampires don't make much sense, either. They massacre almost the entire town on the first night, and then... what? Are they playing cards somewhere, waiting for the handful of survivors to show their faces? If they're hunting the humans for food, they're doing a sloppy and wasteful job of it. (Also, while the idea of vampires taking advantage of the perpetual night of winter above the Arctic Circle is a good one, what do they do during the summer when it's perpetual daylight? Do they sail their ship to the South Pole?)
Some iffy editing (there was one scene where a character appeared to be attacked by a vampire, only to reappear moments later without a scratch) and trendy-yet-hard-to-watch strobing shakycam during fight scenes didn't help either. All in all, if you want to watch a *really* tense and scary horror film about a group of people trapped in the snow by monsters, look no further than The Thing.