I threw 30 Days of Night (2007) in the 'ole Haifeng DVD player with really low expectations -- it stars Josh Hartnet, an abhorrent actor whom I still bear a grudge against for his part in that vile Kevin Costner coast guard movie -- and it's a vampire flick at that. A few years back, the Blade trilogy had already resurrected the vampire genre with the first two films and then killed it off again with that abominably cheesy Blade 3.




The genre has been further maligned by Uwe Boll (of course) in both BloodRayne movies, and stands to be completely obliterated by the upcoming Lost Boys sequel.

Plus we live in the age of zombies so what are people doing making vampire movies?

Anyways, I bought 30 Days of Night solely because I was interested to see which of the ten stock vampire clichés the movie would rely on for narrative devices (would holy water be effective? would someone use some kind of UV ray gun? ancient prophecies foretelling the age of vampires?), and I wanted to see how goth the vampires would be dressed.

As it turns out 30 Days of Night is better than you'd think, and is actually a pretty engrossing horror movie. Adapted from a graphic novel, they key strength of the movie is its premise: once a year, a small town in Alaska goes through 30 days of absolute darkness. A clan of vampires clues into this and then isolates the town of 152 inhabitants and proceeds to feed on them for the duration. So the result is a play on the standard "race to daylight" vampire movie with an entire town being besieged.


The whole thing feels very Stephen King, and all his trademark devices have been lifted: unwilling hero in the form of a small town sheriff, town dynamics in the face of ancient evil, stilted dialogue, and bits of gory humor here and there. Carried over in the adaptation is the unflinching comic book seriousness with its subject matter and a juvenile sense of wonder at supernatural villainy (the vampires speak in their own ancient vampire language and intermittently spout off stock nihilistic vampire commentary on the weaknesses of the human race).

The acting is inconsistent, some of the execution is bungled, and some groan-inducing clichés have been shoe-horned into the film (this is one of those movies where they introduced a big gnashing metal thresher at the start to set it up for someone to be thrown into at the end), but overall the framework of the thing keeps it all together -- the gore is good without being overdone, and the vampires are interesting to look at -- and its worth 7rmb. Grade: B.

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