30 days of bite, kill and repeat, and little else

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

October 19, 2007

(C+) If you like your gore straight up, no chaser, see 30 Days of Night. It's got a great idea to go with that grabby title: A band of vampires descends on Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the United States, just when the December sun is about to set and plunge it into monthlong night. Sam Raimi (director of The Evil Dead and Spider-Man movies) and his long-time film partner Rob Tapert co-produced this blood fest.

Starting with the ice-blue-and-white Columbia Pictures "Lady Liberty" logo, it's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

On the classy side of this film's equation, we get Josh Hartnett as the town sheriff and Melissa George as his estranged wife (a roaming fire marshal stuck in town), who make an attractive, imperiled couple. Ben Foster, the white-hot scene-stealer from 3:10 to Yuma, brings his oddball intensity to "The Stranger," who's really just a harbinger of doom, and Danny Huston's knack for breathing up a smarmy, curdled air of leadership, usually as government officials in movies like The Constant Gardener and The Kingdom, has never been more resonant or appropriate than in his role as the head vampire.

On the crass side is a relentless succession of decapitations and flesh-shredding slaughter.

The movie rarely fulfills its promise to be the horror-film equivalent of that Arctic sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World (1951). The turns of character, such as a growling hermit proving his selfless valor, are so pro forma it's hard to dignify them with the label "twists." You're mostly stuck with a few survivors as they battle extreme cabin fever while knowing whatever they do - or whether they do anything - they're more than likely doomed.

Director David Slade and screenwriters Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, working from the comic book by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, fail to imagine how Hartnett and George and a random band of Barrow citizens could use their northern-exposure survival skills to outwit the undead. They simply find a secret attic space, then wait for a distraction so they can replenish their stores and reach a safer hiding place. Like the moviemakers, they squander an inspired gimmick - the killing power of a sunlamp, which provides the comic book with a bang-up climax.

The splash of red against night-shrouded snow provides a piquant, bloody-elegant visual motif, and director Slade at least makes sure the vampires move lickety-split (emphasis on the lick and split) as they jump their targets and sink their teeth into them. And the vampires' faces take on creepy oblong shapes as they bare their fangs. But there's nothing ingenious or transporting about the bloodletting. Worse, Slade's handling of the drama is often emotionally tone-deaf. Nary a tear is shed for the sheriff's mother (his younger brother proves to be a stalwart). And the director reserves the most graphic beheading for a tragic character who has killed his wife and kids rather than risk their necks to the vampires.

The comic book is swift and in its gray-and-garnet look, bloody sleek. 30 Days of Night turns so monotonous and repetitive that, by the end, you feel as if you've lived through an entire month of Black Sundays.

>>>30 Days of Night (Columbia) Starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Ben Foster, Danny Huston. Directed by David Slade. Rated R. Time 108 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com