30 Days of Night: Should You Spend Even One Night?

30 Days of Night was directed by David Slade, with his film right before this one being the controversial Ellen Page starring Hard Candy. 30 Days Of Night has the quirky premise of being based in an Alaskan town where it is night for 30 days straight and a group of vampires have decided to come for a visit. It stars Josh Harnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, and Ben Foster.

The idea for the film sounds equal parts interesting and silly, though it is indeed based off of a graphic novel. I'm not sure if the novel is as full of plot holes or not because of said idea involving the sunless town. Time is a major issue in the film with apparently 30 days worth of night going by in what seems like one night without any good lapse shown. I thought the movie was still going on in the first night when all of a sudden here they are talking about how the sun will be rising the next day. True, Harnett had a scruffier beard, but it was weak and unnoticeable. The passage of time needed to be allotted for better and quite frankly it appeared like the vampires wiped out the town on the first night alone any way. I won't pick apart the other issues like that too much, one should consider this a horror "popcorn" type movie.

The acting is pretty forgettable. In fact, out of this entire movie I would say the one thing that stood out was the leader of the vampires. The vamps in this film are an interesting, blood thirsty lot (the gore flows) who speak their own language even. The leader is played by Danny Huston and I found it cool to see him in the role because generally he comes across as an often times swarmy, yet prim and proper type of actor. Then again, as cool as I thought it was seeing him as a brutal vampire a lot of his performance, along with many of the others, is reduced to posing for the camera. Every other scene just has him staring at the camera like he is lost and cannot actually see what is going on through those big black contact lenses they have him wearing. I guess another cool point of the film was the effects on one particular beheading, but other than that nothing shined. The dialog is cheesy cliché, for example a vampire child saying something like "Want to play?" Come on, this isn't a Child's Play movie!

The ending was a disappointing cap off to what had built up into a mess and ultimately this popcorn flick won't have me sitting through it ever again munching popcorn.