Okay, I'm going to make these two reviews short and sweet because I feel like crap.
I saw 30 DAYS OF NIGHT 2: Dark Days last night. I remember reviewing 30 days of night a couple years back. Not that great a movie, but better than the sequel. As you may recall from the first movie, up in Barrow, Alaska, this group of vampires used the month long night they have up there to gorge themselves on an entire town of helpless humans, and it was only the sheriff and his estranged wife who managed to survive. Sort of. The sheriff became a vampire to save his wife, you see, and at the end, he watched the sun come up... with predictable results.
So this movie begins with the wife, apparently on the lecture circuit, trying to warn people about vampires and what really happened up there, only no one believes her. Except 3 people, who lost ones they love to vampires, just like she has. So she joins this brave band od vampire hunters with the sole goal of finding and slaying Lilith, the vampire queen. Lilith is apparently the one who organizes these month-long vampire cruises to the arctic, sort of like an undead travel agent. Only, you know, slightly less upbeat.
You know what confuses me... They take this girl on without knowing a thing about her, into a vampire nest, without ever having found out if she can handle herself. They say they've done these vampire-killing excursions before, yet the first time the plan deviates, the girl freaks out, and someone dies. The supposed leader of the group is way too soft to have gone around killing vampires by the score, and the whole group falls apart at the first sign of trouble. Frankly, I thought it was some sort of setup, because they are getting their intelligence about Lilith's location from a supposed "good" vampire, and these losers are obviously ill-equipped to handle any sort of problems that crop up, it's a wonder any of them lived through the first vampire killing at all.
Possibly the only good parts about this movie are that the main heroine is sort of hot, the vampire queen chick is cute, especially naked and covered in blood (looks more like cherry kool aid to me, but hey, I'm easy), and aside from some minor characters getting in the way, these two go at it mostly alone. Chick fight. Awwww yeah. That's what I'm talkin bout.
Other than that, eminently forgettable. I doubt I'd watch it again except I saw it on Syfy and they blurred out the good parts.
LET ME IN: This was the american remake of the one I watched earlier this week. Usually the american remakes are either gorier, more violent, or more explosive, but in this case, the two movies are almost exactly the same, down to identical dialogue. Honestly, I preferred the foreign version, because at least there were more instances where you were slightly creeped out by the vampire's behavior, or like the incident I described in the first movie review, her eyes shined in the dark as a surprise for the audience, but the main character missed it completely. They didn't even put that scene in the american remake, and the other instances where the vampire showed off more of itself than it wanted to, were not as good as the foreign version.
Something they added to the american version, that I don't think was even in the foreign version was a series of pictures of the vampire girl and her old human protector as a young boy. Now here's where things get confusing, the american remake is set in the early 80's, and the guy who's her protector is possibly in his 60's (his age is kind of vague, but he's obviously getting too old to kill for her), and yet he is shown in the pictures with her as a young boy. Yet the pictures are those 3-pics-in-a-row kind of thing you'd get in those little photo booths you'd find in gaming arcades, where you'd put in a quarter and get a quick bunch of pics of you and your friend or whatever? Which would mean those pics would have had to have been taken in one of those booths, what? 1920's? 1930's? Did those sorts of booths, where the film is instantly developed by the booth machine, even exist back then? I highly doubt it. And what's with that whole, you can't take pics of vampires thing?
I understand they were trying to emphasize the creepiest part of the foreign movie, by cementing the idea in your head that the boy is just a replacement for the old, used up protector, but that's what made the foreign film so creepy... you could never tell if the vampire girl actually loved the boy she was befriending and protecting, or was just manipulating his emotions the same way she did with her last protector. And that's what made it so creepy. In the american remake, it's almost spelled out for you, dumbed down, as it were, and that just makes it too obvious to be creepy. Also, they changed the ending just enough for it to be less suspenseful, less exciting. I'm not really sure why, but they did. I don't know how you can take an entire movie word for word, scene for scene, and then change the ending to make it worse for no apparent reason, but hey, that's what they did.
Given the choice, I'd highly recommend you see the foreign version, Let The Right One In. The title's a bit stupid since there's basically only one vampire, so it's not a matter of choosing which one to let in, and neither is there any confusion about whether she's human or not, at least to the audience, so I guess they were hard up for a title. Let me In would be a better title in any case, but aside from that, the foreign version is better in every way. I think the actors even did a better job, and since the dialogue and scenes are otherwise identical except for the changes for the worse, there's no point in even seeing the american version. The only things different that were mildly interesting were the american actors, and that the setting was well-reinforced with various 80's phenomena to cement the setting in place, so much so that putting a time and date on it were unnecessary.
Well, there's sunday night's reviews. There's no way I am getting a novel written this month with the blog and all these physical ailments lately, so I am putting that off til next month, allowing me to focus more on the horror movies this month, and getting my reviews done. Yay!
I hope everyone is enjoying the horror movie season more than I am. Bleh... you know I don't usually mind virii having a party in my body, but damn! Don't overstay your welcome! And clean up after yourselves. Empty RNA cans everywhere and there's a dead cat in the pool, wtf is up with that? And don't even ask what the body-equivalent of a dead cat in the pool is. I couldn't even begin to guess.
Reviews #5 and #6 down, 25 more to go!
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