Monday, January 28, 2008

30 DAYS OF NIGHT

“30 DAYS OF NIGHT” (Josh Hartnett, Danny Huston, Melissa George & Ben Foster)

It was 9PM; the dog & I were bored, so we decided to go see the gory vampire movie for a buck at Gateway in Federal Way. (He waited in the car)
I was a big fan of the horror genre as a kid (Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, etc) & the last ‘monster’ movie I went to was Van Helsing (Bringing back the old time monsters)
So I decided to see what passes for ‘horror’ these days (plus it cost me more in gas than it did to see the film) Holy crap, people – this stuff is beyond gruesome!
When I saw the names Danny Huston (The Proposition) & Ben Foster (3:10 To Yuma) in the credits, I thought, ‘all right, this is going to be a real classy affair – that’s a couple of top quality actors right there’ . . . Well, Danny never speaks a word of English & Ben has 3 scenes & his character is never given a name, so... so much for wishful thinking.
But in the end, surprisingly, I liked this film. Despite the several times I muttered the full name of the Lord’s son while viewing horrific scenes of humans having either their throats torn out or their heads chopped off, I actually enjoyed the over-all story of how this nightmare came to take place. After discovering that the town of Barrow, Alaska would be engulfed in perpetual darkness for a 30 day stretch head vampire Marlow (Huston) says in some strange Klingon-sounding language “We should have come to this place centuries ago!”
These aren’t the 2 fanged Bela Lugosi vampires from my childhood, these are new, improved – yes, ‘evolved’ vampires who have 3 rows of razor sharp great white shark sized teeth that rip their victims’ throats to shreds with a single chomp. They are so messy that each vampire has a perpetual ‘beard of blood’ stained upon their chins & necks.
Josh Hartnett does a decent job as Sheriff Eben Olson; the only man in town with any hope of figuring out a way to defeat these undead cannibals & Melissa George as his estranged wife is very believable as she gradually rediscovers why she fell in love with Eben in the first place despite the fact that all of their friends & neighbors are being eaten like buckets of KFC at a little league end-of-season picnic.
It does fall back on the predictable at times & I really didn’t like it when the first victims were all the huskies – killed so the humans wouldn’t have any way to escape, but I did walk out of the theater feeling ‘entertained’. Of course, the toughest part was explaining to my dog why he didn’t hear any barking going on in a film set in northern Alaska!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I took a flyer on this one and went by myself. I thought it was a very well done vampire type horror.
The acting wasn't totally unbelievable or hokey like a lot of horoor, and the vampires were modernized, like sort of bionic blood suckers.
In the end I was surprised at how much I was OK with it and how grisly it actually was.
I'm thinking Danny Huston is not that far away from becoming A list material. He can act !

Anonymous said...

Kurt, have you seen 'The Proposition'? It's currently being run on the TV movie channels - Danny Huston plays a violent, nasty character in it as well, but the story is so good it makes the horrific moments bearable.
I also saw '30 Days' alone because my wife would have hated it & I agree with your assessment 100%, I was surprised at how much I liked it.