Rating of
4/4
30 Days of Night
TrifibianTerror - wrote on 11/08/09
30 Days of Night. I love this movie, it's a fresh take on the now dulled Vampire sub-genre of aristocratic, sauve, beautiful, brooding Vampires I have grown to hate. These are what Vampires are supposed to be: cunning, vicious, unstoppable animals. Not prissy, pale things. These things were scary. They didn't hiss or go 'grr!', they screamed like demons. That guttural, yet oddly high-pitched shriek is enough to send shivers down my spine!
Josh Hartnett, I believe, did an amazing job as Sherrif Eben Olemaun, an actor I wasn't too fond of.
The concept is fresh and original, away from the aching backstories of these undead. These were monsters whose only purpose was to rip your throat open and drink your blood.
The stark, almost Expressionist (yeah, I'm that pretentious!) visuals lend a total sense of bleakness and darkness about the place.
The only thing I didn't like was the ending. Well, okay, it was good, but not the graphicnovel's ending, SPOILER wherein Eben, having turned himself into a Vampire and kicked almighty ass on the other Vampires and Vincente, the main Vampire in the graphic novel, not Marlowe, shouts to the remaining stragglers 'GET THE **** OUTTA MY TOWN!!!' seems so amazingly brutal after this hellish month of darkness and death. Instead, he stares at them and they run off. Meh...I understand why they didn't include the story arc of Vincente and the New Orleans Vampire Hunters (which was released as a seperate disc called 'Blood Trails') because it would have ruined the momentum of the story, aswell as the feeling of hoplessness. In a graphic novel, it works fine, because the overlapping stories in the graphic novel suit it well.
One other thing I didn't like was the pacing, which I felt made film feel as if it could have taken place in one night.
But apart from these minor annoyances, I thought this film to be a breath of fresh air from what has come before for so long, and the best Vampire movie to date. Raw, primal, bloody and actually scary.
You owe it to yourself, if you like Vampires and/or the sub-genre, to watch this film, even of you just like a good horror story.
