Movie Report: 30 Days of Night

It's October, so there must be vampire movies!

And for a vampire sorta zombie movie, this one wasn't bad. In fact, J and I liked it enough that we picked up the graphic novel the movie is based on today.

30 Days of Night returns vamps to their feral, bestial roots. Black trenchcoats, mouths full of fangs, speaking a super-secret vampire language with a guttural growl. And there's not a whiff of romance to them.

And I'm glad. The vampire as sexual predator bit is getting tired, and I think I'll scream the next time I see a story with the plot of "I met a super-hot vampire and he banged my brains out."

So we get a tiny Alaskan town cut off from the outside world and facing 30 days of night. Vampire buffet! So they send in a ringer (with possibly the worst dental work ever seen on screen -- GROSS!) to wreak some havoc and then move in for the kill.

And kill they do. These vamps aren't neat eaters, and it appears that they rip through the majority of the town the first night. Which caused for me a bullshit moment. If they need this much blood and they're this brutal, the human world would have caught on long before now. If they were just having some good, old-fashioned blood orgy fun, they wasted 28 days or so of night. Because what do you do now that the town's dead? Have a quilting bee?

In this case, they spend the rest of the time hunting down a handful of plucky survivors led by Josh Hartnett, who can't rouse himself out of his sleepy drawl even when there's a nasty, fangy vampire breathing down his neck.

I did like, though, that everything the humans did seemed *real.* There were no random fireballs from crashed cars, and no superhuman feats of strength. Some of them were kinda dumb. They got grubby as the days passed. It looked, and felt, like what would actually happen.

Yeah ... and then someone punched through the back of someone else's head. But it was danged cool, and it was a climatic point for the flick, so I'll give it a pass.

This was a very stylized, cool-looking film, for as gritty and grubby as it is. There's a long, overhead shot of the town during the massacre ... wow. You won't forget it.