The following is a long form review that I originally wrote in 2010.
A new-age, brilliant vampire movie that never got the acclaim it rightfully deserved.
30 Days of Night is one of the few films I like that I can never understand why other people don’t. Though I do prefer other movies like Revolver, Doomsday and Donnie Darko to it, with those I can always understand when people don’t see in them what I do. With 30 Days of Night , if you don’t have a problem with gore, then you shouldn’t have a problem with the film. And yet I have personal friends as well as people I’ve heard from online who totally dig horror, gore, vampires etc. and yet don’t like 30 Days of Night , which confuses me all to Hell, let me tell you.
Though I was mildly aggravated by the inconstancies in the number of vampires around, other than that I can find virtually nothing bad to say about 30 Days of Night . Firstly you have Josh Hartnett (The Faculty ) as Sheriff Eben, protagonist, secondly you have Danny Huston (The Proposition ) as Marlow, leader of the vampires, who attack Alaska during the winter period of 30 days without sun (which in and of itself is an awesome concept, and thirdly there’s Ben Foster (Pandorum ) as the vampire’s human lapdog, all of whom are personal favourites of mine. That’s not even mentioning the fact that Eben’s wife is played by Australian Melissa George (Triangle ), who was born in my hometown, so even if she wasn’t a great actor, she’d get auto-points.
Basically every point in which 30 Days of Night differentiates from the comic it’s based on is an improvement to the story, which is (gasp, shock, horror) a mildly realistic Vampire film. God forbid. I love the vampires in this. Though they’re not quite as sexy and well-dressed as they are in _Underworld _or as demonic as they are in Buffy the Vampire Slayer , they bring a totally new brutality to the vampire class. They wear what you’d expect late 30-ish people living in 2007 to wear, they’re stronger than the average human, but not impossibly so, they hunt in packs and give off bloodcurdling, atavistic shrieks (of which I give quite a good impression; sidenote) they’re unrelenting an animalistic but just as intelligent as a regular person, they’re quick, dark and deadly.
There’s no camp to be found here, not always a good thing, but in 30 Days of Night , it is. I honestly cannot recommend this one enough, despite its intense gore and general panning, I implore you to at the very least give it a go, and decide for yourself.
Both the human survivors and the vampire invaders are there simply trying to stay alive, the vamps through their sadistic, systematic hunting of the local populace for their food-source, blood, and the people by trying to both hide, and fight back, but mostly the former. Ironically, it’s the “humanity” of the humans that causes every one of their downfalls, while they’re leached from above by a far superior race, who goes so far as to call humans a “plague” and invent a new language all for themselves, just so as to not have to speak the same filthy way we lower-beings do (and I mean, if your choice was between that and having to put up with American-English, wouldn’t you?).
86%
-Gimly
