There are pretty much three common monsters for horror movies. One is zombies. Two is werewolves, and three is vampires. 30 Days of Night is, of course, about vampires, who have, shall we say, an acute allergy to daylight. I typically find vampires the least attractive of the undead, mainly because they're "cute" versions of zombies. I mean, really. Cute zombies? If you're going to be an undead beastie, just be honest and go for the brains. Let's be serious here... if you're a vampire, you sleep in a coffin, are cold as death and probably smell like soiled granny panties, so why bother trying to look suave and cultured? Embrace your undeadness and stop pretending already!
So this movie is set in Barrow, Alaska. I think they were trying to go for the whole "The Thing" feel, setting it in Alaska like that, or maybe they did it just because nobody thought to set vampires into alaska before, capitalizing on the whole "darkness all day during winter" thing. In any case, this movie kind of runs a little slow for the first 20 minutes or so, trying to build the suspense. On the last day before the month-long night in Barrow, all the satellite phones in town are stolen and burned. The sherriff and his deputy wonder who did it, whether it was a prank or what, but any Sherriff worth his salt would have figured something was up right away. Come on, all the spare sat phones? Obviously someone's trying to cut off the town. But not this sherriff! Obviously they picked Eben (Josh Hartnett) because he looks good in a badge, not for any real talent at the job. Later on, as the less hardy residents leave town for the month-long period of darkness, a bunch of dogs are killed, and a helicopter is wrecked. This doesn't really build the suspense any, since ol' Sherriff Eben just shrugs it off like it's a normal day on the job for a few dozen dogs to be brutally hacked to bits and all the phones in town to get burned up right before the town is completely cut off for the winter. Eh, damn kids nowadays, right? Course, Eben is currently having wife trouble, and his wife is a goddamn gun-packin hottie, so maybe he's a bit preoccupied since he hasn't been getting any in a while, who knows?
So once night falls, the snow comes, and people begin dying. First to go is the guy at the weather/power/communications station at the edge of town. An old, fat, balding man, who I kind of identified with at first, is brutally cut down and beheaded, and they stick his head on a pole in the middle of the damn road. The vampires just surrounded him and tore out his throat and blood was everywhere in the snow and congealing and pooling and oh god it was so horrible, horrible I tell you! HORRIBLE!!!! :-o
Yea, I had to try and build the suspense up somehow.
There are several things I like about this movie. One, the setting and atmosphere are pretty solid. There's darkness, there's snow, there's blizzards, there's reasons why the town is cut off, and everything looks pretty realistic. There's a lot of blood when one of the vampires rips out a throat, and it stays frozen in the snow. Two, the vampires are easily recognizable as vampires and have mostly the same traits, but they feel odd enough that they kind of stand out, even against other vampire movies I have seen. Three is that, aside from the first 20 minutes of the movies, the rest of the movie is a constant brawl as the surviving town residents fight against the vampires and try not to die.
There's a few things I don't like about this movie. Josh Hartnett badly plays an asthmatic sherriff, for one. Two, the vampires apparently have little social structure or intelligence, poor discipline, and a distinct lack of foresight after apparently hunting humans for years, because they make a lot of mistakes. Three, those first 20 minutes are interminable. They pretty much focus exclusively on Sherriff Josh and the townsfolk, and honestly, these people are so boring, I was kind of cheering on the vampires. And I don't even LIKE vampires.
Not a bad movie overall. There's some good suspense once things get going, and the fighting is pretty brutal. I mean, for a vampire movie. We're not talking brutal fighting like Knights, with Kris Kristofferson or anything (that movie has so much brawling and martial arts it's like one big cage match, even though the movie isn't that good), but still there's a lot of fighting going on around town. Maybe it's because I really don't give a crap about the characters, but I didn't mind seeing them killing each other off. It passes the RW test, or the Re-Watchability test, at least.
I ordered this movie on DVD so I could watch it while on a recent camping trip, so I've seen it a couple times now. I chose it tonight because they're forecasting snow in the morning! :-o That, and I'm down to only a few DVD's left. AMC and TCM are showing horror pretty consistently now though, so I don't think I'll have a problem making it through the month. :-) We're in the home stretch! Two weekends to go! :-D
No comments:
Post a Comment