30 Days of Night
Its early winter, and we’re in the inhospitable North American town of Barrow, Alaska. It is swiftly revealed that the town (population a measly 152) annually suffers 30 days of perpetual darkness due to the seasonal fluctuations of the earth. As the film opens the town’s Sheriff Eben Olemaun investigates a series of unusual incidents (the town helicopter is sabotaged, satellite phones stolen, internet failure) which emerge to be the chilling preparations of a posse of vampires who are intent on murdering every human in the town, be they man or woman, young and old…
Where to begin? Sketchy characterisation collides with some clumsy fore-shadowing (hmm, why look one guy drives a scythe-wielding industrial vehicle!! Ah, I see the town has a lethal shredder waste disposal compactor – I wonder if we’ll see them in action later on?) ensuring that you have just about enough emotional investment in the main players to care when the undead begin their gory rampage. Josh Harnett and Mellissa George are as usual pretty average but solid, with robust support from some genre supporting players. For me, the lack of any explanation or allusion to where the vampires have come from or who the leader is betrays a lack of imagination in the script – I haven’t read the graphic novel on which the film is based but I would think that the source material would take the time to develop the bad guys appropriately.
I’ve always preferred my vampires to be perverted souls, unholy spirits divorced from god that we see in films like ‘Salem’s Lot’ or the classic Hammer ‘Dracula’ cycle, rather than the vampire as a different species, as animals that we see in the ‘Blade’ movies and in this effort. The vampire myth has always been a potent metaphor for other angles or areas – immigration, infection, sexual repression, AIDS etc etc. but none of this is apparent here. I know this all sounds negative (rhesus negative? Ho ho ho….) but I actually quite enjoyed this, it’s a Friday night, beer and pizza movie with no pretensions to be anything else. It’s genre cinema that you can let wash over you, by the numbers stuff that you can guess the outcomes off although to be fair this does have a nice touch toward the end which I don’t think I’ve seen before. Oh, (heh..) and I have to say it has the best decapitation scene I’ve seen for a long time. Enjoy !!
For the record, my favourite vampire movies are probably ‘Nosferatu’ which is still genuinely eerie and creepy despite (or perhaps because of) its 85 years vintage, ‘Near Dark’, the aforementioned ‘Salem’s Lot’ (I still have vivid memories of Mr. Barlow making his gut wrenching appearance!!) and this oddity – a Corman produced cheapo AIP picture from 1964 with the superb Vincent Price. It’s the third adaptation of one of the ultimate vampire novels ‘I am Legend‘ by Richard Matheson. In fact, we will be treated to the long gestating third version early next year with Will Smith taking the lead. The trailer looks…..OK but I’d ‘stake’ my life on the fact that they’ve jettisoned the gloomy ending of the novel. We shall see….
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