30 Days of Night

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

What better place for vampires to emerge than an Alaskan town that has to spend a full month without any sunlight? With a cool concept and a unique setting, I was ready for 30 Days of Night to be a good, down-and-dirty vampire flick. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work.

In a promising opening sequence, Ben Foster appears as a quietly malevolent wanderer lost in the snowy endlessness of the Alaskan wilderness. He finally stumbles upon a town: Barrow (a real place, I've learned), enjoying its last day of sunlight for the next month. Concurrently, the local town sheriff (Josh Hartnett), is presented with some strange phenomena: most of the town's cell phones have been stolen and dumped into a hole. A group of snow dogs have been stabbed to death. "That cold ain't the weather," the wanderer says. "That's death approaching."

The sun slowly sets - and so far, so good. A great, creepy, impending sense of dread. Then the vampires attack and the film dies a slow death thanks to stupid plot developments and boredom.

Yes, boredom. The main problem is that the movie's just plain not scary. Sure, the vampires are pretty darn intimidating, since if they see you, there's a good chance they're going to rip out little pieces of your neck with their teeth. But there are no big fright moments for the audience. At no point will you jump in your seat. Before vampires attack somebody, you know they're coming because they have the annoying modern horror movie habit of making horrible screeching noises and rushing blurrily in front of the camera. That's not scary, that gives you a headache. I kept wishing the vampires would just try to creep up on somebody. Or maybe appear in the background, without screeching. But no. They love to screech. Stop screeching.

And hey, from their standpoint, why shouldn't they? They're waaaaaay too powerful. Their speed and strength is much better than the average human's, which leads to way too many unbelievable scenes in which our heroes somehow manage to not bite the dust.

After they handily take over the town (which we see in a showy but impressive bird's-eye view of the town as it devolves into chaos), a small band of survivors hole up in an attic and try to figure out what to do. Front and center, of course, is the sheriff, who's name is Eben, although for at least the first hour of the film I was certain it was "Evan." Seriously, it helps to know his name is Eben, or else you'll start wondering why a few of the other characters seem to have speech impediments. From this point the movie could go a few different creative or entertaining directions...

How about the character development? Sure, it's there: among those holed ...