Not bad, not great

Rating: 6/10 (26 October 2007)

30 Days gets a lot of hype for reinvigorating the vampire genre. People who aren't clever may even use the term "new blood" because they feel it is a cute pun. Whatever. In a nutshell, the movie is pretty decent for a modern day horror flick as it's not a Saw knock off, a teen horror or a Japanese remake. Kudos for that. It does have drawbacks that stop it from being exceptionally good, however.
To start with, the entire concept of the movie seems cool if you just at first hear it. A town that is bathed in night for en entire month gets hit by vampires. Yes indeed, what a concept. Except it's 2007 and if vampires have been surviving just fine for this long, who cares? Are those extra few hours of night every day, in a town with 150 people in it, that important? Seriously? Wouldn't this have worked just as well if the sun still came up? With communications down and vehicles out, where the heck were those people gonna go? Which brings me to another point... why is the town so isolated if it's night? I manage to do stuff at night all the time. Why can't planes still fly? Or trains, or any other thing? Wouldn't life have to continue as normal, wouldn't these people have adapted to that?
The vamps attempt to cover the tracks at the end by burning the town. Convenient exposition tells us it's so when people show up again, they think it was just a tragic accident. Call me crazy but decapitated corpses laying all about a burned down town and an oil pipeline that was smashed to pieces look slightly suspicious. Maybe covering their tracks isn't a huge deal, but unless the most Neanderthal investigative team came to check it out, someone might have noticed it was more than an accident.
30 days. Obviously this is a key point in the film. That's a long haul. I never read the graphic novels to appreciate if the fact that this is an entire month is significant, but it sure isn't significant in the movie. This could be 3 days for all the difference it seems to make. We're never really shown that the length of time has taken any toll whatsoever on the characters involved. They must be sleeping terribly, they're not bathing, and, realistically, it should be freezing cold in every single building, but for the most part they just seem slightly inconvenienced. Two things indicate a passage of time in the movie - scruffy beards and the odd slugline at the bottom of the screen letting us know time has passed. It's really inconsequential.
The movie is also a little longer than it needs to be, insofar as it repeats the same theme a lot. Run and hide and run and hide and run and hide and every so often the number of living people dips a little lower until just a handful are left. And at the same time, we're tossed really random things that get explained very poorly. Like the little girl vampire at the general store. She speaks English, unlike the vamps who raid the town, yet no one else seems to know who she is. Where the heck did she come from? And speaking of little girls, what's with the little girl at the end of the film that Melissa George saves? At first I assumed she was bait like the previous girl we see in the film, only this one is followed by a single vamp who makes no effort to come after the survivors. But..why?
This isn't really a plot issue, but I found myself confused by bald vampires. I could have sworn that bald vampire was killed like 3 times.
The UV lamp scene has to be mentioned, if for no other reason than I almost slapped my head in frustration about it. He runs to granny's house, turns on the generator, hold sup a UV lamp and burns one vamp. Then, surprise, they cut the power. But he runs out the back door and gets away because none of them thought to actually move with any speed or cover that back door while he was in there. It seemed like the vampires were intentionally throwing the game in that scene.
Again, having not read the books, maybe there's a little more story, but honestly the whole in medias res thing with the vampires was bizarre. We never learn where they came from, other than apparently somewhere in Europe, if I had to guess, or much about their little human harbinger who sets up the town for their arrival. All in all, he's a convenient plot device that is quickly dispatched so we need not worry about him any further.
Finally, the end of the movie was just a little bit ridiculous. To me at least. I mean really...he injects himself with vampire blood so he came duke it out with the poor man's Vincent D'onofrio with a faceful of really bad teeth, then he sits and watches the sunrise. Oh, poetry.
Now, aside from all those slams against the movie, it's probably still worth watching if you're down for some impressive gore tossed at you here and there, and some interesting ambiance.