First Impressions – 30 Days of Night – the movie

Perhaps it was a huge amount of anticipation, or being too aware of the graphics, which has led to me leaving the cinema disappointed…

No, over all I think this was just a relatively poor film. A note here, this is not a full review of the film but my first impressions – a review will only occur when I have watched the DVD and can study the film in depth.

So, what was good? Well, in short, the vampires – but that owes all to Steve Niles – they are sadistic, brutal and animalistic. These vampires shun the Ricean pathos and generic romanticism and that is refreshing – but all was not good with the vampires. It is clear that the filmmakers wanted to make them outsiders but I couldn’t understand why we had to have a strange language thing going on with subtitles.

Other than the vampires much of the film missed the mark. Looking at divergence from the graphic novel, making Eben and Stella estranged was unnecessary, the entire Vicente sub-plot was missing as was the input from New Orleans. The bug eater parts were less powerful as he was more a mortal man and the iconic scene of Stella and Eben first seeing the vampires stood casually in the snow was missing. The film also failed to make it clear (in fact it didn’t even mention) that the vampires had a disadvantage because the cold killed their sense of smell. Okay, I admit that we cannot expect an exact make of the graphic but these were all elements that either needed to be in or shouldn’t have been played with.

The film looked cheap. It was grainy, for no adequately explored reason, and there was a scene of an attack in the bedroom where the set looked cheaper than a lot of straight to DVD films I review. That scene reminds me of another issue. The violence in that scene was best described by a friend when he said it was sadistic. No real problem with that but the film makers then pulled short on other scenes for no adequately explored reason. Talking of gore, how come, after 18 days, there was blood pooled in the Sheriff’s station – it would have been frozen or dried.

There is a scene with a child vampire that had the potential of being one of the most iconic child vampire scenes ever shot but missed the mark entirely. If you have seen the child zombie scene in the Dawn of the Dead remake you have seen a much superior scene.

Generally the acting was poor to average, and the first graphic may have been poor in characterisation but it was a masterpiece compared to the film.

However, the biggest problem was in the action sequences. At first it seems fine, there is an attack on Eben and Stella in a car. A vampire is on the roof and the camerawork is shaky but it works. Thereafter all the action scenes have shaky camera sequences and it looks rubbish – to be honest if you are going to shake the camera like that it means, to me, that you have no confidence in your action sequences.

All told I was, as you can probably tell, very disappointed – indeed I thought the freebie Blood Trails was vastly superior. To be fair, the film is ‘jumpy’ in places, and it is very gory (despite seeming coy during certain scenes) and the vampires themselves save this slightly. However, I was hoping that this was going to redefine the survival horror film and put vampires firmly back on the map. I really feel that, when I do the full review, this is going to get no more than average marks.