October 21, 2007
30 Days Of Night
It's cold, it's dark, it's isolated from the rest of the world. All we need now is . . . VAMPIRES!
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Ben Foster
Rating: 9/10
Directed By: David Slade
Runtime: 113 minutes
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Ben Foster
Rating: 9/10
Directed By: David Slade
Runtime: 113 minutes
It's cold, it's dark, it's isolated from the rest of the world. All we need now is . . . VAMPIRES!
30 Days of Night takes the vampire movie and gives it a nice twist. Our fanged friends decide to descend on a remote little village, the northenmost city in the entire US-of-A, on the day that the sun sinks below the horizon for a long time . . . 30 days to be exact. Vampires with 30 days of walking around room, in a town where the people have nowhere to run and no way to call for help . . . the term bloodbath comes to mind. Aside from that twist, we also get something else. A good script. Real tension. Good acting. Some amazing camera work (the snowy vistas and the crane shots of the town are magnificent). The movie was fun, and it was good. Sufficiently gory for my tastes, but not overly so. The director, David Slade, whose previous work includes the spectacularly unsettling Hard Candy, knows that sometimes less is more. In one scene, a "friendly" has been infected by the fanged ones and must die. We see our valiant sheriff Josh Hartnett, take him into a back room, and hear him chop his head off . . . so much more effective than a gratuitous gore scene would have been.
Josh Hartnett suprised me. I've got no major dislike of the guy, but he's never really interested me either. He delivers a better than I expected performance here. The best performance of all, however, is delivered by Ben Foster, my new favorite creepy bad guy. Just as he did in 3:10 to Yuma, he steals every scene he is in, out creeps anything else in the movie, and just makes me want more!
There were one or two scenes I could have lived without . . . did we really need the creepy little girl vampire asking us to play with her? Or the Josh Hartnett walking to fight the vampire with the bad ass music scene? Aside from those two little things, though, I have no real complaints. I was very much entertained, the movie delivered the creepiness I wanted and the gore I craved, and enough of a plot to engage without trying too hard to be something it wasn't. Based on one of the better horror themed graphic novels ever released, the film had some good stuff to start out with, and I think it really delivers the goods. After all, it's a horror movie . . . and that's a good thing!