Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Earlier today I posted a glowing review of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. That reviewer was in love with the flick and everything was looking up. Then I got these three reviews in quick succession. None of them are positive, but they're not all equally negative. Seems this one is having a scatter-shot effect with audiences. Reactions are all over the place.

First up is our own Memflix!

Hey Everybody. It’s Memflix. It has been awhile since I sent anything in. I’ve been a bit busy, but I wanted to write about 30 Days of Night, a movie I was excited about. One of the things keeping me away has been co-hosting a podcast. My co-host James Pitts (formerly of The Whedoncast) and I will be going more in-depth on the film this Sunday for our third episode at filmdrop.net (sorry for the shameless plug, guys).

With remakes and needless sequels, a good horror flick can be hard to find. But when a film takes a new spin on old material, it can be very refreshing.

30 Days of Night made a promise to breathe life into the undead genre with its fresh approach to the tired and exploited vampire legend.

As a small town in Alaska is preparing for 30 days without sun, a group of vampires on the verge of extinction gets the dinner table ready for a month long buffet.

A small town sheriff (Josh Hartnett), his teenage brother (Mark Rendall), and estranged wife (Melissa George) must save as many townspeople as possible and survive until sunrise. The vampires have survived this long, because no one believes they exist. So not only are they going to feed on hundreds, they have to destroy all the evidence that they were ever there.

Now that’s a good concept!

Sadly, it is not enough. A film needs more than concept to achieve greatness. It needs guidance and a clear vision of the world and circumstance it wants to create.

Unfortunately, that is what it lacks.

Coming off the critical success of 2005’s Hard Candy, David Slade directs a script adapted by Stuart Beattie, Brian Nelson and Steve Niles, from the graphic novel penned by Niles and inked by Ben Templesmith.

The film takes too many cues from Sin City and 300. Those films were designed to play like an extension from their original medium. Night was not. It wants us to be terrified for the humans, by attempting character development and its more naturalistic approach to vampires. However, the ‘artistic’ shots of blood in the snow, headless hanging bodies and business-suit clad feral vampires achieve the opposite effect by throwing us out of the theater and into a comic book. Making matters worse, those shots are sparsely placed sporadically throughout, and peppered with scenes of supposed realism to try and get us not just back into the theater, but into the ‘real’ world. It confuses and strips the tension away when different thematic tools create vastly differing viewpoints.

However, there are moments that truly terrify and it does a great job of creating claustrophobia in such an open environment. Through gorgeous wide shots of the open barren landscape, you know the townsfolk have nowhere to go and little chance surviving a day, let alone 30.

There was nothing notable about the performances, but the gore was disturbing in all the right ways and had me doing the ‘ants-in-the-pants’ theater dance. Even though the comic book look hindered the film as a whole, it looked gorgeous.

Right about the time I was wrestling with whether the disjointed themes were going to ruin the film for me, the climax made up my mind.

Unfortunately, fantasy, not horror or reality won the battle of the themes. Everything it had spent 2 hours building up was thrown away with a derivative plot device seen in almost every other vampire film ever made. This made its attempt at originality a gigantic waste of time and ruined what could’ve been a great spin on the vampire genre.

This next one is probably our most negative of the group.

Hey Quint,

Haven't written before but I saw 30 Days of Night last Tuesday had a very different opinion than Nightsong. I will start by saying I only knew the premise going in and hadn't read the graphic novel. I didn't really have any expectations so the movie had little to live up to other than the fact that I am a fan of horror. I will also say that overall I enjoyed the movie despite the many, many problems I had with it. I think that, overall, it will really appeal to the mainstream crowd that flock to see the Saw movies but isn't really invested in film as an art form or the horror genre in particular. That said, the first problem is the characters. You are never invested in these characters at all and any backstory that is presented seems last minute. Throughout the movie it is difficult to keep track of who anyone is because you have no emotional investment in them. The only real charater motivation (other than not being eaten by vampires) was the failed relationship that is alluded to between Eban (Hartnett) and Stella (Melissa George) and even this is maddeningly vague. It isn't until the last shot (SPOILER ALERT) that we see Eban pull a wedding ring out from a chain around his neck indicating that they were once married but it wasn't until I went on imdb and saw that their characters have the same last name that I was sure of the significance. (END SPOILER). The point being that you don't feel invested in these people at all. As far as the acting goes, Josh Hartnett is pretty bad giving a largely wooden performance that I would partially blame on the dialogue in the script. I think it was mostly just him though. Everyone else is pretty much relegated to the background as vampire food. The other huge problem was the lack of suspense when it comes to the passing of the titular 30 days. The action feels like it takes place in hours not days and when they do indicate the passing of time it jumps 8 or 9 days ahead each time. It would have been so easy to put in 5 minutes of them hiding in the attic,looking tired and scared and then jumping to the next day in order to add to the suspense and show that every minute isn't filled with action. I think 30 days with vampires stalking you is going to partially be a waiting game. Not so much in this movie, though. Also, this movie could've been called "30 Days of the Brightest Night Ever". I understand that snow is reflective and it can look like day during the night but geez. Some of it was so bright and washed out it detracted from the initial premise. I kind of expected more action like "The Descent" where it gets the audience disoriented and plays off that. Instead they disorient you with overused shaky-cam.

In that sense I would have also liked a better sense of the town and where the buildings were at in relation to each other. There are some great arial shots straight down showing the town being attacked but it doesn't give you a sense of place. Given that they are running from house to house hiding the audience would benefit greatly from knowing where in the town they are at any given time. It's very odd because the Utili-thing (forgot the name) building that they are ultimately trying to get to is portrayed intitially as on the edge of town but when they get there it seems like it's right in the middle of town. Minor grievances but, had they been fixed, this would've been a far better film. Okay, so the vampires. The blood all over the face thing was cool. The talking in a made up language with subtitles...not so cool. They didn't need to build a whole mythology around them (and they totally do not whatsoever) but they could've thrown us a little bone especially given all the grandiose quotes that the lead vamp is spouting and the annoying vamp-speak.

Establishing a little of the vampire heirarchy would've helped as well. So those are my personal complaints and I'm sure I could think of more but...what worked? The biggest thing that sticks out in my mind are two specific kills. One with an ax where the camera doesn't pull away and hint at the carnage as it does in some of the other kills. That kill in particular got a huge groan from the crowd which always makes me smile. Also the big one at the end was very cool and imaginative although I would bet that it is exactly what happened in the comic. It has that feel to it. I won't ruin it but I liked it quite a bit. The shaky cam stuff was over used but most of the action was done well. My feeling as I left the theater was that horror fans are subjected to so much dreck and sub-par crap that I am willing to overlook quite a bit for a few good kills and some gore. This movie has that but the thing that bugged me the most was that, as I watched, I found myself not only identifying the problems with the movie but finding obvious solutions that would have alleviated the missteps and really elevate this movie to a horror classic. It's one thing to think a movie flat out sucks but it's another to see the glimmering potential that doesn't ultimately come to fruition. As long as you go into this movie with the idea that it is mindless entertainment you will enjoy it. If you go thinking horror classic you will be sorely disappointed. If you use this call me....RYTRON3030

Actually, this one is pretty negative, too...

Fellas,

I attended the advance screening of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT last night at the Dobie theater here in Austin.
I was unfamiliar with the comic, and I hadn't read any reviews. All I knew was what the trailers showed, and that Danny Huston was going to be playing the head vampire.

That being said, if the source material is any good, which I'm assuming it is to some degree in order for it to be considered for a film, then the film must not be doing it justice. If it turns out the film does do the story justice, then the source material must suck too (and not in that pun-like "oohhh it 'sucks' because it's about vampires" way).

I think everyone gets the gist of the story. A small town in Alaska experiences an annual lights out for one full month, and some vampires not originated from there find out about it. When the sun goes down, not to rise again for another 30 days, the vampires start pecking away at a bunch of people we either know nothing about, or really couldn't care less about.

Leading the way of the cattle is Josh Hartnett, the town sherrif, and Melissa George as the fire marshall. They're just about the only two attractive people in a 90 mile radius, so they of course have shared fluids in the past, but they're having a falling out right now and so they need to be thrown in to this life threatening situation in order to save their relationship. The only other townspeople of any significance are Hartnett's character's little brother, Mark Boone Jr. (the bad cop from BATMAN BEGINS that has to swear to Christian Bale instead of God because Bale told him to in a very angry voice), and Nathaniel Lees (The guy who screams a lot when he guns down flying squid machines in MATRIX REVOLUTIONS even though he didn't complete his training for the mech thing he was operating).

There are other people, too many in fact (Ben Foster being one), but the film introduces them just to kill them off. The actors I actually named are barely even relevant, even though the film really wants you to feel like they are. They throw in everything they can think of to make these people seem likeable and human enough to empathize with them, but they mostly come across as cliched, or annoyingly dumb during times of despair because there are at least 4 really bad decisions these people make.

There's not enough backstory at the beginning to give us any insight to who the people are, but we know they have relationships, and we know they have family. We just don't meet any of the family, nor experience any of the relationships. This is a story that would have really benefited from using the FROM DUSK TILL DAWN outline. Half of that film was character introduction and development, while the other half was survival/horror. This is more like 90/10 in favor of survival/horror, and when the favor is that lopsided then you really need to rethink the way you approach your portrayal of the subject. If they wanted to make a balls out vampire film they should've done that, and if they wanted to focus on the dramatic then they should have taken the extra time to do that. If what they wanted was a little DIARY OF ANNE FRANK with the people being in hiding then they could have given more energy to character development and not worried so much about taking some emphasis away from the vampire threat. There's too much unnecessary time given to Danny Huston as the head vampire and his minions because they do very little aside from killing people that would warrant giving them as much time as they do. They could have cast some complete unknown in his role, or done away with the character completely, because he does nothing more than say ininteresting things in a foreign language, and look brooding. They portray the vampires like animals, but for some reason they feel the need to make them actual characters, and it does nothing more than take time away from the actual characters that we're supposed to give a shit about.

The misuse of Danny Huston really pissed me off, because his performance in THE PROPOSITION sold me on his capability to make a memorable bad guy. The problem is that if you have a bad guy that barely speaks it's hard to make him noteworthy, and if you write a bad guy that barely speaks then why cast Danny Huston?
Also, for a film where one of the major plot points is the need to survive for 30 days, they do a piss poor job of portraying a sense of time progression. We know it takes place over a 30 day span, and it lets you know how many days it's been, but it feels like everything happens in one night. I get that it could be because there's absolutely no sun for 30 days and that's why it feels that way, but there could have been some better way to show that a good deal of time had passed. They make 12 days feel like two hours, and time shouldn't be represented that fast if you're not making a movie about PCP. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to depict 30 days and make it feel like 30 days. Josh Hartnett seemed to do a good job of that in 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS, because I REALLY felt his pain in that film, but I didn't get that sense of longevity here.

Now, pretty much all of this I could disregard and give a slight pass on if it wasn't so obvious that they were really trying to make this a dramatic piece. If they would have just gone out and had vampires run rampant and kill people then I probably would have enjoyed it more, because when they show the action scenes it's moderately entertaining. It might be more enjoyable for people that haven't really seen good, or gory, horror films like this before, because the group of people behind me were reacting to the kill scenes like it was the greatest show on earth with a bunch of oooohhhhhhs and aaaaahhhhhhhs. But, take my word for it in that it's nothing that hasn't been done before, and some of it done better. However, they do want drama so they don't do an all out vampire massacre from start to finish, it's just the lack of character connection gives all of the non-action a strong sense of melodrama.

So, it looks like they were really trying to give us something a little more than just a mindless good time, but with no real know-how on what they needed to do to make it successful. They wasted: a good premise on bad time progression, a good actor on an irrelevant villain role, potentially intriguing drama on a need to introduce the threat so quickly, or potentially good action with a need to give us underdeveloped storylines, and Ben Foster.

This is a story that probably needed at least a two and half hour running time to do what it was trying to do. Or, they could've just completely tossed the film idea and made a nice little addition to the survival/horror video game genre. It looked like they almost thought about that idea, because during the big massacre in the town the scene is shot from a top view, and looks exactly like they were doing a live action version of LOADED.

So, for anyone that was anticipating seeing this, as I was, and has seen a good number of good horror films before, then I really don't think you need to bother with this one. You'll more than likely easily pick up on all the shortcomings, and the few things that are quite good are in way too small doses, or are contradicted by something really not good. There's a couple of funny scenes that I couldn't tell whether they were intentional or not, but for as little as I was enjoying the film up until that point I didn't care and took whatever piece of intentional or unintentional form of hilarity they were willing to give.

If you use this, this is The Beef