30 Days Of Night (2007)

Directed by: David Slade
Written by: Steve Niles/Stuart Beattie/Brian Nelson
Based on comic by: Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY–Strangely enough, this doesn’t look as funny as it used to. But it is Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow, so I’ll give it a shot. It just looks more like a parody movie now than, well…funny.

BEOWULF–More CGI looking at this point. But I’m so there. One thing, though: why the FUCK is Grendel’s mother hot?! That just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM–Speaking of not making sense…this looks bloody awful. And is Lance Henrikson in it? I don’t even want to know. Fuck off.

BE KIND REWIND–I’m there. Michel Gondry? And I love Jack Black’s version of the Ghostbusters theme. Yeah. I’m all over it.

Ok. Let’s get on to the biting of the flesh.

Barrow, Alaska is the northern most city in America. And, for one month out of every winter, they have no sunlight.

And now the vampires know.

That’s really the whole story. The rest is just Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his soon to be ex-wife, Stella (Melissa George from Turistas and The Amityville remake) trying to keep as many townfolk alive as possible for the next thirty days. And it’s a bloody fucking battle. My personal favorite shot is the old-school video game shot. We’re talking the Contra game here. The camera is on a helicoptor just kind of looking down as vampires make people explode blood all over the pretty white snow and people take pot-shots at vampires. You don’t know who’s who until the blood flies.

Director David Slade (Hard Candy) didn’t make a perfect movie out of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s comic. Not at all. He made a fun movie, but not a perfect one. In fact, I’m kind of hard pressed to say that it was really good. It was just fun with some pretty good scares in it.

The problems really were the characters and the dialogue. There really were no characters to speak of, actually. At least, none that I really cared about. I spent most of my time guessing who was going next instead of worrying about it. And some of the dialogue was pretty laughable. There were cliches thrown around left and right and just lame dialogue peppered throughout just for kicks. And I didn’t really like that we didn’t seem to be privy to the vampire’s conversations. We just kind of came into the end of most of them. “The head must be separated. Do not just turn it.” What the fuck?! What does that even mean?

But, on the good side of things, the scares were good and the vampires, while a bit annoying at times, were pretty creepy looking. They had the Body Snatcher scream going for them and for fucking ONCE, they didn’t speak English! They spoke some Germanic language that I had no clue about…as it should be!

I also really liked the end. It was a bit surprising and incredibly violent and gory. This movie doesn’t let someone just chop a head off in one chop with an axe. It takes a few hits. And, at least one time, they show every…single…hit. Blech. And YAY!

I hear that they’ve already greenlit a sequel. I’ll be there. It was enough fun for that. Just don’t go expecting any kind of masterpiece. This is more trashterpiece.