Audiences should be scared of "30 Days of Night."
Not because it's scary — everything about the film is too predictable for it to conjure any moments of real terror. Rather, they should be scared that it is claiming to reinvent the vampire movie while really just proving the old adage that if it's not broken, don't fix it.
The basic plot involves Josh Hartnett ("The Black Dahlia," "Lucky Number Sleven") and Melissa George ("Turistas," "The Amityville Horror"), who play a married team of sheriffs who are the last line of defense against a vampire invasion of a quiet Alaskan town.
The film follows the survivors of the initial onslaught as they try to last 30 days for help to arrive.
As the title implies, the story takes place during a month when the sun never rises, and for some bizarre reason all communication or travel with the outside world is cut off. Apparently in this version of reality airplanes can't fly at night.
The story goes downhill from the start with flat unoriginal characters getting into ridiculously predictable, trite situations.
There is a hint of a romantic subplot, but it never really gets off the ground.
Things get so ridiculous that at one point the survivors actually use grow lamps to fend off the vampires. Yes, you read that right. Grow lamps. Yes, they were previously used for that purpose. Yes, that one.
The good news is that the vampires seem pretty cool. "30 Days of Night" re-imagines the vampire as more of a feral pack hunter. Vicious and brutal, these vamps are a far cry from Louis or Lestat.
The bad news is that this new breed of vampire is never fully explained or even shown all too closely. A few scenes show the vampires tearing through the city, but as a whole only the results of their carnage are shown.
By offering up vampires that clearly function outside of traditional vampire mythology, the film castrates the vampire, removing its innate terror and leaving nothing in its place.
While "30 Days of Night" tries to present itself as a brutal and graphic horror flick, it just doesn't have the brass ones to really show the gore.
Over the last few years films like the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes" and "The Devil's Rejects" have pushed the horror genre in a grittier and more realistic direction. Though this film tries to follow in their footsteps, it fails miserably.
The body count alone is appropriate for the genre, but it doesn't matter because it is impossible to care about any of the characters.
Besides Hartnett's character, all of the male characters look alike. Their names are mentioned in passing, and they all have facial hair and wear hats and heavy jackets.
To top it all off, the film almost completely lacks characterization. Besides George, the female presence in the film is too negligible to even mention. Audience members will undoubtedly leave the theater unable to remember more than one or two of the characters' names.
The setting is just as remote as the characters, as the lack of light in every scene makes all the settings blur together. This means that an essentially unknown force is attacking a group of indistinguishable, unknown people in a bunch of undetermined locations.
What it comes down to is that "30 Days of Night" never gives the audience any reason to care about the action that is taking place on screen. Even vampire buffs should stay away as there is little here they haven't seen before and no doubt in a much more engaging way.
Reach the reporter at zachary.richter@asu.edu.
