Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/23/2008 Run time: 113 minutes Rating: R

David (Hard Candy) Slade directs this nerve-jangling adaptation of the popular graphic novel series about a mob of vampires that overruns a remote Alaskan town in the grip of 30 Days of Night. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are the film's de facto heroes (he's the stoic town sheriff and she's his estranged fire-marshal wife) but the picture's real MVP is Slade's camera (along with cinematographer Jo Willems), which careens across the town's snowy landscape to detail the vampires' horrific assault on its inhabitants, which are quickly pared down to a hardy few. The script, co-written by the source material's creator, Steve Niles, along with Pirates of the Caribbean's Stuart Beattie and Hard Candy's Brian Nelson), proudly wears its influences on its crimson-stained sleeve (Bram Stoker's Dracula, natch, but also Salem's Lot, Night of the Living Dead, and John Carpenter's version of The Thing) and boils down the graphic novels to a series of tense and extremely bloody standoffs between Harnett and George's band of survivors and the vaguely Slavic and ferocious bloodsuckers led by Marlow (a feral and frightening Danny Huston). And if the characters seem stock and the finale begs suspension of disbelief, the set pieces leading up to it are sufficiently supercharged with suspense and violence to please most horror fans. Standouts in the supporting cast are Ben Foster as the film's Renfield figure and Mark Boone Junior; the disturbing score by Brian Reitzell also merits a mention. --Paul Gaita

Stills from 30 Days of Night (click for larger image)

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I've been hearing how bad this movie was from it's first day in the box office and while I agree, it is a bad movie, I had a lot of fun along the way. If I had to sit through a reading of the script I'd probably want shoot myself but the acting was sufficient to keep engaged and while never scary it did manage to keep me tense at a few points. The action was pretty decent, I thought they handled the speed of the vampires pretty well at a few points and the art design was pretty creative as well.

I think the movie spiraled out of control when the humans started fighting back, the vampires seemed to completely lose their edge, especially as they slowed down far enough for Eben to sever off their heads. Then the movie turned to Underworld and Josh had to power up in an unfifilling twist (to be generous) and movie fell apart leaving me wishing that they'd just left the last fifteen minutes out altogether.

30 Days of Night was a fun ride--but you're going to want to leave your inner critic at the door.

Based on a three-issue limited comic series later collected as a graphic novel (which was itself originally written as a movie script), 30 DAYS OF NIGHT works strongest from its visual aspect. The director David Slade really assembled a few very unforgettable images that are salted throughout this work and which are really quite stunning, especially at the very beginning when a mysterious stranger (Ben Foster), with his parka limned with rime, stares at a desolate giant ship stranded in the Arctic wilderness, an image oddly reminiscent of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. There are also haunting shots of a ghostly vampire couple standing on the top of a deserted snowbound village watching a lone human shouting in the streets; a woman holding tightly to a burnt corpse as the sun rises; a frozen head impaled on a single shaft of steel.

Unfortunately, what goes in between these gorgeous ghastly images isn't nearly so unforgettable: the story is pretty standard for horror movies, and the film has the genuine sense of going in for standard gore and torture fare which seems to cheapen everything. There's absolutely no panache about the vampires in this movie, which isolate the town of Barrow, Alaska during its extended winter month without sun in order to prey on the inhabitants: they attack their human prey by tearing away at their throats like wolves. Though its clear the director aims at a kind of grandeur for them by having them speak in a guttural special vampiric language in which the leader of the pack (Danny Huston) intones cruel threats in a quasi-poetic style, they actually seem quite stupid: when they first attack they make absolutely no attempt to conserve their food supply whatsoever, and they spill about 3/4 of the humans' blood all over the snow. And since Slade provides them with no back-story (you have no sense how they got to Alaska or how they kept hidden in the daytime before they arrived), it's hard to take them very seriously: you feel they're just there for cheap scares. The screenplay even descends to such clichés as trying to shock us by having a little vampire girl (in ponytails yet!) attack the humans and have to be decapitated by them. The human characters are almost impossible to sort out from one another and make absolutely no impression whatsoever, so by the end you're not even sure who has survived and who has died. Other than the few stunning grand visual moments, the film doesn't even seem part of the more elevated vampire film subgenre; it seems closer to the standard serial-killer and zombie fare we've all seen too many times before.

For those of you who liked the graphic novel, this is close but not quite it. The director does a great job in keeping to the spirit of the story but makes a few unnecessary plot changes I felt. Some of the scenes are taken almost verbatim from the original story and are done remarkably well. As a whole this is not a movie for the timid. These are not the nice quaint Anne Rice Euro-vampires we've all become accustomed to in the last 10 years or so. No Twilight vampire-lite here, this is your old school blood drinkers amped up to an almost savage animal like behavior. This movie starts fast and doesn't let up until the end.

The blood and viscious kills were awesome. The "caring" 1/2 human 1/2 vampire...and the stupid love story (ending) "killed" it!

I cannot give a legitimate review of this purchase because as of yet it has yet to be completed to my satisfaction.