I love horror - I hated this

Rating: 2/10 (15 July 2010)

First off, let me say I'm a fan of horror. I love Sam Raimi's horror work (e.g. Evil Dead), so I was excited when I saw he was a producer. I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane, just a good horror movie. Most of the reviews I saw here led me to believe that's what I'd get, and I'm writing this because I was very disappointed.
There were some positives. I liked the premise: gang of vampires attacks a town that has 30 days of night due to being in Northern Alaska. I liked the depiction of the vampires as blood soaked and gruesome, instead of some kind of goth vampire glam boys (although it got kinda old the 20th time it showed the same scene of them laughing evilly with their faces covered in blood, and they were kind of clichéd and 2D themselves with their overcoats and nosferatu nails). And there were some beautiful and haunting wide angle shots: the dead ship docked in the ice; the overhead of the vampires going berserk on the town.
Where the movie failed horribly for me was in the most basic task of a movie: telling a story and engaging the viewer. First of all the sound engineer should be shot - I had to turn the volume on my system up to 70 to hear what the characters were saying (they're whispering for 2/3 of the movie), but then during the action scenes when the vampires were screeching I'd have to turn it down to 30 to keep from getting the police called on me. I literally had to keep doing this all through the movie, every minute. Then there were crazy continuity and logic errors throughout. One minute a guy is blowing himself and vampires up, the next minute he's still alive fighting vampires. One minute a vampire is pulped in a grinding machine, the next scene he's still alive laughing evilly with the other vampires. The characters are just totally bogus in their reactions throughout, I couldn't believe in them or relate to them at all, and they are also bogged down by the horrible continuity errors - what they know vs. what they should know, what's supposedly happening vs what we are actually being shown (e.g. supposedly the female star is about to get burnt alive, but the fire is not even near her) etc etc, minute by minute it all adds up to a complete failure. I wasn't able to feel scared at all.