To read an interview with the creator of the \"30 Days Of Night\" comic book, Ben Templesmith, click here
A few years ago, commercials director David Slade made a killer debut with his fractured fairy tale Hard Candy. With its cold economy, it marked him as a filmmaker to watch. For his follow-up film Slade chose to adapt the graphic novel 30 Days Of Night, which has a wild premise"¦
In the northernmost town of the United States, Barrow, Alaska, every year the inhabitants endure a month of darkness. When a clutch of vampires discover this, they head to the cold climes for an uninterrupted 30-day feast.
A small band of humans defending themselves against bloodsuckers with no dawn in sight is a great set up for a horror flick. Pity then, that David Slade and his four scriptwriters have delivered a film that’s so underwhelming.
The lead characters – tough-nosed sheriff Josh Hartnett and his feisty ex Melissa George – are cardboard cutouts and neither actor can do much with them. The supporting humans are even less memorable.
As the lead vampire Danny Huston is wasted. He’s a darkly charismatic American actor with a fantastic voice but here he’s reduced to speaking vampire gobble-de-gook and screeching.
The script sucks harder than even the hungriest ghoul. Characters keep explaining – quite literally – the bleeding obvious, while the story is fragmented so that we skip from Day 7 to Day 23 with no conception of how the survivors have coped or why these supposedly supernatural beings can’t sniff 'em out.
Choppy editing doesn’t help and key scenes are fumbled by us being dropped into them abruptly. But most disappointing is David Slade’s direction. That he isn’t going to do anything new is signalled by the first so-called scare, in which he goes for the hackiest effect around - a blurry shadow dashing across the foreground as the soundtrack blares.
There are a couple of effective scenes – such as the overhead view of the townsfolk being massacred against the ice – and gore fans will be in heaven, but, for me, this is a toothless horror experience.
30 Days Of Night ranks as a real let-down and rates only one and half anaemic stars.
