Film Review: 30 Days of Night

by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

30 Days of Night, (Cert. 15, 113 mins)
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Manu Bennett
Directed by David Slade

THERE is one thing about setting a vampire movie in Alaska – the blood shows up very nicely in the snow.

There is plenty of blood in this tale, indeed a whole town is attacked by vampires and very few survive. Blood spouts out of headless torsos, drips from lips and fairly gushes from numerous necks.

The setting is Barrow, the most northern settlement in the USA, and it is a place where the sun apparently sets and does not rise for 30 days at a particular time of the year. Ideal then for vampires.

Josh Hartnett plays the town’s sheriff with the obligatory estranged wife (Melissa George) and naturally the two team up to fight off the menace.

The vampires are zombie-like creatures with very sharp teeth who go on a killing rampage starting with huskies and ending with children (a child vampire clutching a doll is the film’s most chilling image).

Based on a graphic novel, the film’s major weakness is in not giving its heroic bunch of humans much to do: they spend a lot of the time simply hiding.

But director David Slade gives a nice twist to the vampire zombie genre, although the ending is so peculiar that it spoils some of its better moments.