Movie review: 30 Days of Night

A good bloody show but not a bloody good one.

by John P. Meyer

How could I not go to see 30 Days of Night? We're coming up on Halloween, the air is getting crisper (at least after dark) and I happen to be reading a book (in my off-hours) called The Terror, which - like this movie - takes place in the frigid Arctic when the nights are measured by calendar rather than clock.

In the actual town of Barrow, Alaska (300 miles north of the Arctic Circle), the sun disappears from view on Nov. 18 each year and remains below the horizon until Jan. 24 - which equates to about... let's see... something like 65 days of night as opposed to the (admittedly more poetic) 30 of the film's title.

Given this, it's clear that the movie takes place in a slightly skewed version of Barrow; in addition to the variance in the length of the winter night, the population in the real town (put at 4,065 in a 2006 census) seems markedly greater than that depicted in the film, where all the townsfolk live within about a block's radius. And then, of course, there's those nasty vampires...

Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) has warning signs at his figurative fingertips - the town is about to enter into its dark winter isolation, during which even the nearby airport closes down (guess they've never heard of instruments and landing lights) and suddenly the community's isolation appears to have been enhanced by outside agency: someone has purloined all the cell phones and burned them in a pit; the local sled dogs have been brutally slaughtered; and the community's emergency services helicopter is mysteriously disabled. (The cars and trucks still work just fine, but let's not get technical...) From out of nowhere, a stranger arrives.

The stranger is Ben Foster, fresh from his dapper role as gunslinger Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma - but his character in this movie is considerably less dapper. In fact, he has really bad teeth and a hankering for raw hamburger, two traits guaranteed to put the damper on dapper. What it boils down to is: he's doin' the Renfield thang, prepping the Barrow human population for the imminent arrival of his vampire masters.

These aren't your stately Chris Lee cloaked-in-nobility vampires; these are bad-ass Eastern European feral Nosferati bent on raving bloody rampage, which they proceed to inflict on the Barrow populace after cutting the power and phone lines. These are vampires with serious hygiene issues and lousy table manners who could benefit from several Sam's-sized cartons of Handi-Wipes. Furthermore, the high-pitched ululations of these vampires (especially the female ones) really assault the old eardrums - if Barrow had a strictly-enforced noise pollution ordinance like Dallas, they'd have to tone things down in order to comply. ('Course, they're not overly concerned with civic ordinances, being undead and all.)

Bottom line: they're really quite thirsty.

Along for the gory nightmarish ride is Sheriff Oleson's estranged wife Stella (played by the ever-lovely Melissa George). Stella and Eben put aside their (never adequately explained) differences to team up in an effort to save the few remaining non-vampiric residents of Barrow by shepherding them in and out of various cubbyholes (Kelso's attic; the grocery store; the police station) until the sun returns and the reign of the undead comes to a sunny-delightful demise. At every turn they encounter some new obstacle, either in the form of a thirsty banshee bloodsucker or some hapless human who has inexplicably avoided being sucked dry or freezing to death to that point and is being used by the banshee bloodsuckers as a stalking horse.

Bullets, of course, prove useless against the Nosferatu crew, though axes work to better result - leading to plenty of work for the special effects and prosthetics folks, who end up making us believe that heads are really being lopped off. (Whether this is a cause for celebration, I'll leave to the viewers' individual tastes.)

There's a grotesque artistry to the splashes and trails of blood on the snow, and the vamps themselves (led by Danny Huston as the malevolent Marlow) are certainly scary, alien-appearing creatures. There's just a bit too much wandering aimlessly from garret to garret going on over the course of the 30 days (make that 113 minutes) and not nearly enough situational or character-driven cleverness to keep our intellects as engaged as our fight/flight hindbrains.

In final analysis, 30 Days of Night may be a good bloody show but it comes up short of being a bloody good one. From David Slade, the director who gave us the deliciously-twisted and subversive psychodrama Hard Candy, I was hoping for more.

SCINTILLATING DIALOG IT AIN'T, PT. 1: "That cold ain't the weather - that's death approaching." - the stranger to Sheriff Oleson

SCINTILLATING DIALOG IT AIN'T, PT. 2: "It took us centuries to make them believe that we were bad dreams." - Marlow