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My Vampire Can Eat Your Zombie For a vampire movie 30 Days of Night owes a lot in aesthetic and execution to the zombie genre of the past several years. It feels like, if not exactly the end of an era, certainly beginning of the end of something. It's effective almost in spite of itself. There is a genuine feeling of dread that is established in the beginning and allowed to grow. And throughout the movie this dread morphs directly and sometimes powerfully into fear for the characters and their situation. There are real moments of grinding tension and delicious horror. Enough semblance of humanity is brought to the characters that you root for them, you're frustrated with them when you feel like they make the dumb choice but you want them to win, you want them to survive. On the other hand... We see way too much of these bad guys today. The animalistic vampires of 30 Days of Night are the barely-more-cognizant cousins of the zombies in the Living Dead and Resident Evil movies, the aliens in the Aliens movies, the mutated in the 28 Days Later movies and the vampires of I Am Legend. Sometimes the grotesquerie in 30 Days of Night is so "delicious" it takes you out of the movie, rings false. Sometimes the blood and guts makes you groan in disgust and sometimes you just groan. The situations, the siege of the living by the dead, the struggle of a small band of survivors against an almost faceless horde of monster/animals, feel too familiar, we've been through these exact same conundrums with too many other movies, too recently and sometimes to better effect. Danny Huston does his best to make something meaningful of his growling, screeching, vampire leader but it's rough going. There's no sex in these vampires, no personality, only an insane hunger and ferocious rage. They have a language of sorts, guttural and apparently ancient. The effectiveness of this conceit is undermined by the use of subtitles. What the vampires say is never as interesting as what we might have imagined they would have said. The "solution" chosen by the hero at the end of the movie feels like a ridiculous and rather bizarre leap in logic and commons sense. It doesn't strike one as the ACTUAL only or best choice he could have made. There are glitches in story structure and time passage and various plot holes that almost derail the whole enterprise any number of times. Josh Hartnett continues to hover somewhere beneath genuine movie stardom. He's a leading man, no question, with chiseled features and a charismatic screen presence and his work here makes you think of an updated version of young Clint Eastwood. He's learning where and how to push and tweak his screen persona to get the most out of it but he'll probably never be a great actor. Melissa George as his estranged wife is solid enough and she generates empathy but you don't quite buy her as a female police officer in practically a frontier town in northernmost Alaska. There is a quietly sensational performance by Nathaniel Lees that gives us the most poignant moment of the film: a scene where his character, Carter Davies, realizes his life has changed irrevocably and chooses to take his situation into his own hands. Ben Foster, the young maniac from 3:10 to Yuma, is apparently carving a niche for himself playing (natch) young maniacs. His is the one genuinely frightening performance in the film...and he's not even one of the vampires. Having said all of this, with 30 Days of Night you will work your way through some popcorn. It makes you squirm, it makes you jump, it makes you want to shout at the characters. David Slade, the director who brought us the preposterous but still chilling Hard Candy continues to impress and intrigue. I would venture to guess there is a great movie coming from this man in the next few years. 30 Days of Night is not that movie but Slade is coming closer. There is enough tension generated here, enough character empathy and enough shameless gross-out action to cast just enough of the spell it's trying to achieve. It's a fun movie, a good date movie to watch cuddled with your girl underneath a blanket...and sometimes you can't ask much more from a movie than that. email this review to a friend
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May 7, 2008 2:39 PM
Hm, a horror movie that I would give 4 to 5 stars on? The first two Alien movies fall into that category, sci-fi horror I grant you but still. An American Werewolf in London. The Howling. Rosemary's Baby. Maybe The Exorcist, I'd have to see it again. Probably Dawn of the Dead. The Shining. Halloween. 28 Days Later, definitely. 28 Weeks Later. Just haven't gotten around to reviewing them yet.
May 7, 2008 4:14 PM
I did pick up on what you were saying about the vampires but it still wasnt enough for me to think that THEY were the reason you gave a 3 star rating. I guess I went into this thinking it was going to be average or below and it turned out to be a really fun movie that I have already watched I think 3 times since getting it on DVD..
Alien could be horror but Aliens is not. The Shining?? Jees man...I couldnt have been more bored with that one.......watching that damn kid ride around the hotel for 5 minutes straight did me in........Halloween to me just wasnt scary and the story was lame. I liked 28 days and weeks later...they were cool.
As far as feeling fresh....what movie concept hasnt been done 20 times or more?? Especially with horror films...I mean they are all about werewolfs, vampires, zombies, psycho killers, etc..... except when they get stupidly creative and decide that your cell phone is going to kill you or a plastic doll..
May 7, 2008 4:59 PM
You're nuts. Now I HAVE to write a review of that movie.
Halloween was so scary a whole genre came directly out of it. Friday the 13th, Prom Night, The Easter Sunday Massacre (oh wait, that wasn't a movie.) The one thing Halloween might suffer from is the same thing with Psycho. Everything after it played off of it. They couldn't do the same so they had to do more, more, more. I haven't watched it in a few years but there's no doubt it's one of the most influential horror movies of all time and there's a reason why that's so.
Yeah, I get your fresh argument but then you have to be really EXCEPTIONAL to pull it off. And like I said, I liked 30 Days of Night, but it wasn't that to me. And you know, we all feel that way (everything's been done) -- and there's an extent to where that's true -- until someone comes along with something that it feels like we haven't seen before. The book Frankenstein, the first Superman comic book, when that whole paradigm got turned upside down by Marvel, the movie Psycho, Star Wars. It happens. Can't wait until it happens again.
May 7, 2008 5:19 PM