Nov 03, 2007 03:28
113 Disappointing Minutes
Odds are you’re probably aware of the horror film, 30 Days of Night, and its well-hyped concept: once a year, the fictional town of Barrow, AL (a heavily-modified version of the actual city) sees a month of continuous night, which hungry vampires decide to use to their advantage. The basic elements of this film are very promising: the northern-most possible town in the continental U.S., one month of isolated darkness, and the constant threat of ancient demons.
---CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS ---
The movie begins with the unwitting citizens gearing up for this month. The vampires descend, destroying all means of rescue, devouring citizens and generally whipping things into a wild panic. People are dragged away and eaten and the survivors are forced to band together. The rest of the movie follows their attempts to stay alive until the sun returns.
Is it gory? Very. Violent? Oh yeah. (One victim has his throat ripped-into by a vampire, who is then forced into an industrial trash grinder, which also removes the now-injured man’s hand. Director David Slade [Hard Candy] tries to convey ‘the panic’ of these moments by filming with a handheld camera, to create frame-rattling, ear-splitting action shots.)
Is it a good horror movie? Not for a minute.
Loose-handed with characters, the script doesn’t even bother to build up a connection between the audience and the survivors. We’re expected to automatically sympathize with these people, with their one-trait personalities and hastily-explained relationships.
When a quiet survivor gets infected by a vampire, he selflessly asks to be killed (before he mutates) to keep the rest of the group safe. Then for the first time, he reveals a few things about himself, before another character euthanizes him. It’s as though the writer remembered at the last moment that death is more emotional when the audience really believes in the character, the one doomed. Which is usually the case-provided the character is explained by more than 30 seconds of irrelevant information.
The vampires are nasty creatures, with a speech torn up into snarling, hissing and screaming. Oddly, only the leader actually uses words, and it’s a strange, subtitled, eastern European-sounding language. Like the monsters from 28 Days Later, they’re not trying to infect, or even eat (which seems counter-productive for a vampire movie). The goal here is killing-violently, which gets old very quickly. At first, they’re introduced using “the Jaws Trick”-never fully showing the monster. It’s cool until the film arbitrarily shifts pace, and decides to show us way more of the vampires than we could ever want. There’s a lot of unnecessary gore, and after the first few attacks, tension is practically abandoned in favor of outright violence.
One thing I was excited to see was how the movie would look in the color tone in which it’s shown. While the effect makes the advertisements look great, and really brings life to that Muse song (“Apocalypse Please”), it also tears apart any hope of discerning which character is undergoing said experience when it happens, which is quite often.
This is a shame because the same film tone was used with great effect for the movie Sin City, but that was a movie where action scenes were usually explained to the viewer, because its characters all sported internal-monologue engines. Here the effect makes action sequences (already camera-quaking affairs) spiral into total chaos.
I would love to see this movie done properly. It's a fantastic concept, stuffed with potential, and up until the real thing, the trailer gave me chills. If you liked the color tone in Underworld, this is a little less CG and a little more horrific. But not by much. 30 Days of Night is marred by the worst kind of irony: a great concept, executed with frustrating incompetence.
-Steve Monroe
horror,
30 days of night,
vampires,
movie