Rating of
2/4
Vampire Movie Without Enough Bite.
Chris Kavan - wrote on 10/21/07
Aside from an interesting premise and a few radical death scenes, there's not much else to recommend from an otherwise by-the-numbers horror film with serious pacing issues.
I really do like the premise: isolated frozen town with 30 days of darkness besieged by a small yet vicious group of vampires. Heck, I'm surprised no one else thought of this before. However, in the first 10 minutes you clearly know who is going to make it to the end and who is going to be vampire food. I wish we could get more than cursory character development, but then the horror genre, for the most part, never delves deeply into the psyche of characters.
Then we have the vampires. Ignoring the traditional fangs, these guys have a full mouth of razor sharp teeth. For being around for centuries, you think they would have found a dentist already. Plus, I don't know if they think they're bears, but apparently they need a few hundred gallons of blood. Heck, why kill a few people when you can slaughter an entire town? They spend most of the film with blood dripping down their mouths and ruining perfectly good shirts.
I can handle cookie-cutter characters and frenzied vampires, but what really gets me is that in order to appreciate this film, you have to completely suspend any disbelief. I'm supposed to believe that in 30 days without power, where the temperature is probably 40 or so below, suffering from white-out blizzards, that not one person (or heck, even vampire) is going to get some kind of frostbite or hypothermia or something? I don't care if there are a few backup generators running - and just because you happen to be undead doesn't mean you'd lose a few fingers out there.
Second big issue is in 30 days, I didn't see one decent meal or snack eaten. Apparently from one short trip to the local market I'm supposed to surmise that everyone will now be well-fed as the vampires - on canned goods instead of blood, yet no one was ever shown eating anything. I think the hunger and cold would have taken out the so-called survivors faster than the ravenous vamps.
Maybe I'm analyzing this too much, but it annoys me to no end when things this big are overlooked for the sake of moving the story along. Still, if you like gruesome death scenes, you'll probably be satisfied, even if the end is too abrupt and leaves way too much open-ended.
