Gruesomely entertaining but disappointingly flawed exercise in mainstream horror

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2008)

In terms of inciting premises, few prove as fitting as the prospect of an Alaskan town, plunged into a thirty day period with no sunlight being attacked by a vicious roaming tribe of vampires. The isolated setting and uniquely unsettling natural circumstances set the scene for what should have been one of the most supremely gripping and utterly chilling horror epics to grace the cinema in years. Unfortunately, while Hard Candy director David Slade initially proved just the man for the job, it is his reliance on trite horror conventions which ultimately descends 30 Days of Night from the superb film it should have been to the lacklustre resulting product.
The plot proves oddly reminiscent to classic Hitchcock thriller The Birds through its similar lack of context in the midst of a supernatural crisis. Instead of flooding the audience with eye-rolling historical exposition explaining the backstory of the vampires, Slade cuts right to the chase, so to speak, ignoring such qualms as to why and how the vampires arrived in Alaska and immediately immersing the audience in a breathless fight for survival. However laudable the lack of unnecessary volumes of backstory for the vampires is, a middle ground between it and the complete absence of context would have done wonders, elucidating certain questions and making for a more rich and compelling watch. Similarly, the weak script, leaving next to no room for character development and providing many implausible twists in character motivation, laughably clichéd horror situations and a painfully contrived ending seriously detracts from what could otherwise have been a staunchly quality horror piece.
Slade's film excels on the technical front, its quality especially boosted by the unusually effective cinematography. Mercifully shying away from the trendy nausea of "shaky-cam", the film astutely alternates between jarring, abrasive close-ups and sweeping crane shots (one sequence where the camera pulls back to a bird's eye view of the town, surveilling the helpless denizens being gruesomely obliterated by the vampire onslaught is eerily beautiful), perfectly capturing the desolate beauty of the Alaskan setting. Similarly, Brian Reitzell's musical score proves one of the most effective horror scores in recent memory, its harmonious pounding and screeching exquisitely complimenting the carnage. However, considering the film's reliance on its action setpieces to provide thrills, the action sequences, while suitably bloody, are often clunky and poorly executed, failing to generate more than a routine level of suspense or terror.
Particularly laudable is the treatment of the vampires themselves - in an age where such creatures are often portrayed as slick and classy, it is a breath of fresh air to see this new incarnation of vampires: feral, bloodstained, thankfully portrayed by real actors and not computer generated, and worthy of fear, even if their curiously animalistic movements draw parallels to enemy creatures in most modern shooter games, and the vampire makeup varies between overdone and almost non-existent, either way distracting in its inconsistency. One also gets the feeling that the creatures would prove more chilling with the exclusion of Danny Huston's "vampire speech", as his few hackneyed lines, spoken in a barking dialect only serves to deter from their overall menace.
While the quality of the cast may not descend to the banal dredges which would normally plague such a work, few manage to contribute anything of interest performance-wise. While the typically wooden Josh Hartnett musters a sliver more emotion than his past work, he still remains far too flat a lead to capture the audience's sympathies or often interest. Melissa George similarly remains firmly imbedded in the realm of "stock female action support and love interest" - while George is hardly as abysmal as she could have been, she certainly doesn't offer much in terms of charisma or emotional realism. Danny Huston adds a dash of class as the head of the vampires, though whether the odd imbalance between the humanity and feral aspects of his character was intentional or not remains a constant question throughout. Ben Foster steals the show as the unnervingly captivating mysterious stranger whose arrival heralds the coming of the vampires, and Foster's fiercely convincing portrayal of a man utterly consumed by the grasp of madness is the film's only truly worthwhile performance. Character actor Mark Boone Junior is mostly wasted as a shaggy social recluse forced to battle for his life with the rest of the villagers.
A slew of frustrating inadequacies take what could have been an instant classic of the horror genre, and instead strand it in the realm of the mediocre. While 30 Days of Night offers many a scare and a gruesomely entertaining watch, don't expect much in the ways of profundity or innovation to the usual genre conventions - overall worth seeing for those willing to take it for what it is.
-6/10