can a vampire flick be occasionally interesting, usually OK, and sometimes really illogical? 30 Days of Night is all that

Rating: 6/10 (20 October 2007)

30 Days of Night might be a lot better in the form of a comic-book (never read it, heard many great things), but as a film it's derivative and original, really stupid (mostly towards the end) and with some solid thrills in both the classic and neo-forms. David Slade and his crew do an excellent job at creating a little Alaskan community surrounded by the ominous cold and snow, no argument there. It is something to see the baron streets like out of some ghost town in a western painted with splatter spots of blood, and then the shadows of these pesky vampires coming around the bend to catch their victims. And sometimes he and his director of photography get creative in a good way: I liked the over-head shot that looms above a scene of carnage, probably as something closest to the style of a comic book of this variety. It's also cool to see how Slade tries to emphasize the importance of the background, how even if it's all out of focus what you need to look out for what you don't expect to see, which will pounce and tear you to ribbons. This side is worth looking for in 30 Days of Night.
But there are problems. I can see how there is already a surge of 'fan-boys' for this movie, as it appeals to a chilling aesthetic if one hasn't seen many vampire movies before. I can also see how people hated it even more than me- it is trashy in the sense that it doesn't stop to make any logic out of how the vampires even get to the location by some wandering madman (Ben Foster, should be the performance to garner him an Oscar- for overracting that is- following his actual terrifying part in 3:10 to Yuma) across miles and miles of endless terrain from some foreign land. But in its own way it's a decent B-movie, loaded with some better budgeted effects and production design, as it lowers its sights into being a survival tale without too much pretense. This being said, it's hard not to look at how Slade and company make the vampires, how they move and attack and eat like they're the infected in the 28 Days Later movies, but at the same time still sort of generic when it comes time for their close-ups and one-on-one time, including having a leader of sorts, going back to the Blade series. And while it might be a little harder to make the connection, I can't look at bloody snow dogs in the snowy wilderness without thinking of the Thing- particularly the scene where they're most prominent.
At the least, it stays conventionally pleasant, or gruesome, as it needs to be- it's predictable to a fault, but until the last five to ten minutes comfortably so: we got the hero (Hartnett, who is OK in the role, but is better as a garnish ala Sin City), the tough girl, the big guy who has all the chops to take the buggers on, the young sprout teen who wants to prove himself, the naiive old folk, and Foster as the crazy guy...But then that ending, which makes any logical flaws beforehand look irrelevant in comparison. Hartnett, in an attempt to stop the vampires from getting the lead female, who's hiding under a car, amid a huge blaze set all across town the vampires set up, injects himself with a deceased vampire's blood, becomes one in part, and then goes out to fight the main bad-ass vampire leader. There's sections I could go on and on about this, from the factor of the fire to the other vampires just standing around not doing anything while there's a big meant-to-be-romantic fight to the un-death, to why they all left the convinience store in the first place. But it all comes off as unbelievable, even for a horror movie, and I couldn't help but laughing out loud as suddenly Hartnett comes back to win the day through a ridiculously gruesome manner. It's one of the worst endings I've seen in a movie this year, and almost left me with a worse taste in my mouth from what was previously an alright entry in the Sam Raimi-produced horror-for-kids of the moment.