30 Days of Night: Dark Days – review

Director: Ben Ketai

Release Date: 2010

Contains spoilers

Dark Days is the sequel to 30 Days of Night and is loosely (and when I say that I mean very loosely) based on the graphic novel Dark Days. It is often unfair to compare and contrast with the books a film is based on but I find it difficult not to with this. There are obvious reasons why it is only loosely based – after all 30 Days of Night (the movie) deviated from the original but there are further changes.

attack

So, before I go on a spoiler spree – for those who don’t want that I will say that Ben Ketai cut his teeth on the short presentation 30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust and does what he can with an obviously reduced budget. He certainly proves himself a better director of action sequences than Davis Slade but script, story and effects leave us with a product that perhaps floats below average, all told…

burning under sunlamps

Okay spoiler time. We begin with a recap of the events in Barrow, with a new Stella (Kiele Sanchez). Aspects of the original are shown along with Stella replaced. Stella is now trying to make the world listen and has come to LA because a letter from a mysterious correspondent called Dane (Ben Cotton, Blood Ties and Stan Helsing) has suggested a presence of vampires in the city. Stella is giving a talk on what really happened at Barrow, people laugh when she mentions vampires but she has a surprise. Sunlamps – these fry the two vampires in the audience causing a panic. Stella is arrested.

She is in an interrogation room when Agent Norris (Troy Ruptash) comes in and tells her that no-one will buy her clever little hoax. He unhooks the camera and then tells her that the bodies are gone and that he would kill her but someone else feels that such an act would draw too much attention. The threat is clear and Stella heads for her motel.

hunters

She gets into her room and is faced with three strangers – Amber (Diora Baird, also Stan Helsing), Paul (Rhys Coiro) and Todd (Harold Perrineau). These are hunters sent by Dane and I was unsure as to this set up. In the graphic Stella had set the group of hunters up herself and this indicated a lot about the character that had occurred in the intervening year. Anyway they suggest no-one will believe Stella and Amber wanders off for a smoke, disgusted with the supposed new recruit’s attitude.

nothing lives without a head

She sees a vampire approaching and heads back inside – they have found Stella. Given the message was she wouldn’t be killed, and the fact that these vampires will not act without an alpha say-so, one has to wonder at this turn of events. The vampire ends up with head trapped in the doorway, blown apart by gunfire – an effect that I thought a little ropey, to be honest. The hunters take Stella to Dane.

Ben Cotton as Dane

Now we see the real difference between this and the graphic. Dane is a vampire but somehow the change didn’t take and he kept some humanity. Actually, in the graphic, he was after revenge for the killing of Marlowe, until he realised that Eben had not killed Marlowe and it was the vampire Vicente who had killed Dane’s sire. Dane suggests that Lilith (Mia Kirshner, Dracula the Series and Vampire Diaries) is in town and nothing is done without her say-so as she is the real big vampire cheese. Here come the really big spoilers.

resurrecting a crispy fried vampire

By the end of the film Dane will be killed – despite being the best character to go into the spin off novels – and this will be without having a sexual relationship with Stella, who instead has a quicky with the vanilla, and all too human, Paul. This actually means the development of Stella as a character does not happen in parallel with the graphic and so the identical coda feels wrong. The coda is the resurrection, by Stella, of Eben – as she discovers that blood will raise a crispy fried vampire. This leads to her subsequent biting by her resurrected and hungry vampire husband.

poor doomed Agent Norris

Worse still the two best characters, for me, in this film – Norris and Lilith – are also killed, despite also being excellent recurring characters in the novels. We are losing all resemblance to the graphic/prose novels and that is a shame. Perhaps if the filmmakers were not using the books as a loose basis then things would not be too bad. All new characters and new stories set in the 30 Days universe would have seemed the more logical way to go.

Mia Kirshner as Lilith

On a plus side the click click language has gone. That was a good thing and Kirshner proves herself yet again with a presence filled performance. I didn’t buy the Stella arc in this, they missed the point to my way of thinking. The other vampires didn’t look as good as those in the first film. I did like the way they built an animalistic vampire society (though society is perhaps a strong word given the low number of vampires that seem to be in it) but if Marlow, Lilith and Dane (and to a degree Norris) could show free (human level) thinking, why not the others?

Kiele Sanchez as Stella

The hunters were a major fail – they are meant to be rough, tough vampire hunters but they make fundamental mistakes and don’t even know about the virulent nature of vampirism in this universe. In other words, if one of your group is bitten, don’t take them with you. That said, they are up against vampires who they can torture, say they will use (in front of the vampire), release and follow straight back to a nest! Not the brightest buttons in the box then.

This is flawed, but it did work to a degree and worth a watch for the eerily evil presence of Mia Kirshner. 4.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.