Great concept, terrible story

Rating: 2/10 (7 November 2007)

I went to this film expecting to be scared, the idea of vampires with a free reign for 30 days is definitely enough to give me nightmares.
The vampires initially did seem fairly threatening - fast, powerful and brutal. They seemed animal-like compared to most modern portrayals. At some point though, they became lobotomised goons and seemed to switch from ripping peoples throats out to trying to shriek them to death.
The prey was a small group of village survivors who repeatedly made the not so wise decision of leaving their hidey-holey to look for another despite the fact that the vamps had shown no signs of finding them for several days, seemingly due to the lack of any searching or tracking skills or vampiric super smelling. My cat would have found these people in an hour, but then it's partial to regular meals while the vampires were perfectly happy to spend 29 days on the pickings of whatever fool decided to brave the outsides themselves.
What's the point of a 24 hour buffet if there's nothing to eat? Apart from the dim-witted witted vampires and equally dumb towns people, I also found the films constant attempts to disgust and offend grating. I was unable to be particularly shocked by the actions of newly introduced characters, or the deaths of various townspeople I knew little about.
All in all, I was not encouraged to sympathise with the survivalists, or fear the villains - which is a shame, because the basic concept of the film does contain some gold