30 Days of Night.

Director: David Slade
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George

This vampire movie (based on a graphic novel of the same name) was part of the usual batch of horrors out around Halloween this year and was released on November 1. With strong source material and horror supremo Sam Raimi on board as producer, there were reasons to be optimistic about this one.


The premise is interesting; a small Alaskan town is thrown into darkness for one month every year as a result of it's geographical vicinity. Resultantly, a canny bunch of vampires sees an opportunity for 30 days of uninterrupted killing and cuts off the town from the outside world before getting down to business.


It's hard to know where to start with this one, so i'll begin at the beginning, which is excellent. The opening is suitably eerie, and certainly looks the part. The film is, in fact, beautiful to look at for its duration, its muted pallet of whites, blacks and greys lit by halogen lamps making for a convincingly understated but slick aesthetic. The panoramic shots of the lifeless arctic wasteland surrounding the town that open the film work very well, unsettling straight from the off. So far so good then...


Until the film actually starts. Then it's all downhill...


This film has one of the most depressingly bone-headed scripts in recent memory, insulting it's audiences intelligence at every corner, with a penchant for stating the obvious and a lack of any internal logic that aggravates from the word go. The characters are all terrible, with the exception of Ben Foster's "Stranger", who has a go, but only offers some unintentional comic relief - he tries his best with the severely slack script but falls short of the turning-shit-into-gold-esque feat that would have been required to eke some entertainment from the thing. The Protagonist, local lawman Eben (played by the tirelessly maladroit Josh Hartnett) has all the likeability of Hitler circa 1940 and the antagonistic head vampire looks like Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys (and is about half as scary). The dialogue is relentlessly po-faced to boot, with not one hint of irony.


The film's biggest weakness however, lies in its seemingly solid premise. It sounds interesting and original, but in practice just falls apart - setting a horror film over 30 days was always going to make it impossible to sustain any tension and really messes round with the narrative, making it cumbersome and uneven. The direction, whilst marginally satisfying during some of the action scenes, is also an irritation, with a proliferation of protracted close-ups on Hartnett's face as he "acts". At nearly 2 hours, it's also tortuously long


This was a real turkey. I soon forgot about the admittedly good looks as I slowly descended into the miasma of shit that was unfolding infront of me....


And if you think I'm laying it on a bit thick, go and see it, you'll understand.


0.5/5