30 days of tripe

Rating: 1/10 (10 December 2007)

I don't know anything about the comic book this is based on but the trailers looked great (as all trailers do & are supposed to of course!) so I decided to give it a try.
The film is extremely slow to get going, sticking to the adage "don't show your monsters too soon". The film has classic horror ideas, "town with no power" & "the phones are all out". The 1st 3 attacks are shot too quickly and over as quick as they start. If their supposed to be heightening the suspense level they only succeeded in increasing my levels of annoyance and frustration.
The trouble with the film is it goes from nothing at all happening to a lot happening with no explanation or transition of events between, which makes the film seem very badly cut.
The monsters are vampires & when Hartnett finds one of the 1st to be attacked becoming a vampire it is clear the gore factor is going to be low (the attack with the Axe is implied) but does show the vampires can be killed.
The film is slowed down again, with a side story about a guys dad escaping the house (why were they whispering inside? Do vampires suddenly have super hearing?) but neither of them were characters we knew enough about to warrant caring if they lived.
Even after showing all the vampires they insisted on killing the son in a blurred attack. There's no point in hiding your monsters once we've already seen them. The trip to the store for supplies was bound to find a vampire once Hartnett didn't search the place when he first entered it. A vampire child was a nice touch though.
The attack by her was shot too fast and the camera was over-cranked too much. The female vampire hurt by bright light then suffering in pain was stupid. Why show your monster to be so weak? The guy attacking them from the JCB made them look even weaker & again shot too fast & over-cranked to hell. His driving into the shopfront seemed pointless and had no motive.
Why they waited so long to reveal the power station guy had been bitten by the girl is a mystery. It was obvious she'd bitten him so why wait 20 minutes for the guy to tell them himself is beyond me. This slowed the film down yet again, another bad idea.
Once we'd gone back into the shredding plant which was so unsubtly introduced at the start of the film it was a foregone conclusion that someone or something was going to fall or be pushed into it. Clearly someone had been stealing ideas from Wrong Turn 2: Dead End.
Predictably enough, after being attacked & bitten Billy pushed his attacker into the shredder (in a blink and you'll miss it moment) & lost an arm as well. Hartnett cutting off Billy's head with the Axe is about the goriest thing in the film.
With 15 or so minutes of film left to run and the biggest gimmick in the film already used I wondered how they were going to wrap this movie up, if they were going to take the "everyone dies" approach or "the hero kills all the monsters" approach or "the hero gets infected and has to be killed" approach or something else.
When their thinking about saving the female cop I was amazed that by this point no-one had introduced a hunting rifle with scope. This is a town that's bound to have bears & wolves close by and no-one seemed to have one? They were also saying that the following day was sun rise so 29 days had passed? The vampires using the oil pipeline to burn down the town is pointless. We already established they hate bright light (so they are going to hate fire), they already snatched and killed or infected most of the towns people (they said there were only 5 left alive in the jail). Saying it was done to cover their tracks so they could do the same thing again in another town is a very weak idea.
Likewise the idea of Harnett infecting himself (with Billys blood) to save the lady cop (Why not just let her and the person with her die, he didn't seem to care her about her anyway?), an equally bad plot device. Also we had already seen the vampires kill other vampires if they were injured or showed weakness so why he thought they'd let him anywhere near them in his partially infected state is beyond me.
Realistically Hartnett should never have been able to defeat any vampire in a straight fight. They looked like they'd been around a long time (the weird language indicated that too) and he'd had all of 2 minutes of being a vampire. Of course their fight was shot too fast and over-cranked like every other action scene in this film & I still couldn't really tell how the vampire was killed (shot it looked like but Hartnett lost his gun earlier in the film).
Having killed their leader the rest of the vampires leave what's left of the town and Hartnett is left to die and burn up as the sun rises (a scene stolen & lifted wholesale from Blade 2). You never see the whole process and we linger in the female cops eyes for a long time which is never explained.
An exceptionally weak ending in a really awful film that has no redeeming qualities at all.