30 Days of Night - DVD Review

October 03, 2008

I read 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith a few years ago, and I remember really liking it, though I can’t, for the life of me, actually recall anything about it. So I figured that makes me a perfect candidate to review the film adaptation, right? I’m going into this movie with a pretty much blank slate. No expectations.

Funny thing about it is that it actually was a movie pitch before it was a comic, but no one wanted to make it! That’s shocking to me, because I think the notion of a group of vampires attacking a northern Alaskan town during that weird period where there is no sun is absolutely brilliant. It’s one of those “I can’t believe no one else thought of this” kind of ideas.

But enough about how brilliant of an idea it was, let’s get to my review. I had intended to see this movie when it was released in theaters last October, but I just never got around to it. Turns out that was a good thing. While it certainly wasn’t a bad movie by any means, it wasn’t really a good one either. Are you familiar with the term “meh”? That pretty much sums it up. Not bad enough to offend me, but not good enough to make me spend even five minutes thinking about it the next day.

What’s good? Well, the concept, as I said before, is a great one. Here it is in a nutshell: Barrow, Alaska is the northernmost town in the United States. For 30 days every year, the small town experiences a period without any sunlight. A group of vampires figures “Hey, this is neat. We don’t have to spend the day in a coffin. Let’s go have ourselves a feast.” And feast they do!

The whole movie has a very surreal look to it. The sky doesn’t look like a real sky: it’s got this weird, swirly painted look to it. There’s a lot of shots of the town where it’s quite clear that it’s a scale model of a town, not a real one. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it adds a very dreamlike quality to the movie. The vampires don’t seem human at all: they look like Nosferatu dressed in black overcoats, and they speak in some weird vampire language. They surround their prey like a pack of wild animals and attack with the same ferocity. That part was awesome.

What’s bad? Well, pretty much everything else. There’s a story about the local sheriff and his estranged wife, but it’s so clichéd and dull that it’s hard to care. Remember how I said the vampires look like Nosferatu in black overcoats? That’s true, but it’s also true that they look like rejects from The Sopranos with pointy teeth. It doesn’t help that the head vampire appeared to have a mild mental defect. Seriously, he did not look scary at all. For that matter, nothing in the movie was really scary. I’m what is commonly referred to as a “chickenshit”. I jump at every shadow or loud noise. This movie scared me about as much as The Sound of Music, so… I guess you could say that for a horror flick, it fell pretty short of the mark.

Overall, I won’t tell you to run away from this movie. Visually speaking, it’s an absolutely beautiful movie to watch. That dreamlike quality I described earlier is pretty much its saving grace. It’s got some really good gore too, so fans of that will not be disappointed. Every time I thought the movie hit a point where I just didn’t care anymore, somebody got hit in the head with an ax. So that kind of drew me back in. Like I said, it wasn’t all bad.

If you’re a vampire or horror movie junkie, you could do a lot worse than 30 Days of Night, but you could do a lot better too. It’s the type of movie I generally refer to as a “Sunday afternoon movie”… if you’re sitting on your couch with nothing better to do, go ahead and watch it. You probably won’t hate it, and you won’t be crying over two hours of your life that you’ll never get back. But ten minutes after the movie is over, you may very well forget you ever saw it.

The DVD also features commentary with stars Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, as well as producer Rob Tapert. There’s also 8 behind-the-scenes featurettes and an episode of some Japanese cartoon called “Blood+” that I didn’t watch.


Click here to read the staff review by Mania.