Why do the vampires scream in “30 Days of Night”? Remember the days when vampires went quietly about their business, appearing suddenly and proceeding silently about the business of bloodsucking?
Everything’s amped up now, so vampires must hiss and roar when they move in for the kill (a technique I trace back to the original open-jawed menace of “Alien,” although there may be predecessors).
So it is in “30 Days of Night,” a single-note adaptation of a graphic novel. This movie has a great idea: Since we all know vampires are unable to function during daylight, a group of predators arrives in Barrow, Alaska, just at the moment the Arctic town goes into its annual month-long season of unbroken night.
Holding down the human side of things is a sheriff (Josh Hartnett) and his estranged wife (Melissa George), along with a handful of survivors of the initial vampire attack. They can’t get out of town, because they’re surrounded by snow and ice in every direction. Oh, and it’s dark out.
After a promising first 15 minutes, the movie settles into a fairly humdrum search-and-destroy routine. Director David Slade (who did the small-scale “Hard Candy”) hammers things home pretty obviously, although an overhead shot of the vampires running amok down Main Street is effective.
The vampire-in-chief is played by Danny Huston, who speaks a weird dialect that might be Transylvanian, or might not. It’s hard to tell, because everybody’s screaming all the time.
Speaking English, though none too clearly, is a human slave to the vampires, played by Ben Foster. What Renfield was to Count Dracula, he is to this bunch. With this drooling, sneering performance coming on the heels of “Alpha Dog” and “3:10 to Yuma,” Foster has made his bid as overactor of the year.
“30 Days” gets ultraviolent at times, but what bothered me the most about it were issues of logic. How are the survivors able to sneak around without leaving footprints in the snow? How are they running their generators without the vampires hearing them? How did the vampires get up to Barrow in the first place — did they actually fly all that way? If they did, boy, are their arms tired.
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