Based on the comic by Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith
I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed that when IFCO’s rating came up this was only a 16. From the trailers I was hoping for a total blood and gore fest. Still, despite not making the 18s cut there was plenty of violence and a high body count. Not to mention plenty of blood. Blood every where. And then more blood.
The film starts on the last day of sunlight for 30 days in the Alaskan town of Barrow, and local Sheriff Eben has to deal with some strange incidents. The stealing and burning of mobile phones, the killing of the town’s sledge dogs, the sabotage of the town’s helicopter, and then a stranger shows up causing trouble. When Eben carts him off to jail he beings to spout strange warnings about who or what is coming.
Course we’ve seen the trailers so we know that the what is vampires. Although it takes the characters a lot longer to bring up the V word, despite seeing them drink the blood of people.
Parts of this I really enjoyed. It has all the darkness and bleakness you might hope for in a horror. An entire town pretty much devoured by vampires. And these aren’t the refined Anne Rice type of vamp, these are animalistic, shake your prey like a dog, blood spattering everywhere, type of vampires. And then there are the band of survivors, dying off one by one, and occasionally being turned. Which of course results in the beheading of your friends, and of little vampire children. Cool.
And it all looks great. The 30 days of night helps with that; there is no respite from the darkness. The vampires too look great. They are far from the romantic Dracula type, instead they are about as far from pretty to look at as they can get while still retaining a weird sort of grace in their movements. And I really liked the way they behaved, all obeying the leader like a pack of wolves, plus the noises the made. Well cool.
Actually their main attack on the town reminded me of hunters, especially those pictures you see of seal-hunters clubbing the cute lickle baby seals with the blood pouring on the snow and the dragging away of carcasses and still living fur seals
I did have a slight problem with the fact that the blood always seemed to be fresh, even 20 days after it had been spilt. Surely it would have frozen? And the characters weren’t that interesting. And it took a while to get going. But all in all I’d recommend this for any vampire fans.
it sounds like they've done it really well!
the only bit that doesn't sound good is what happens to the poor dog… does one see it :( i hope not!
It is well done, I haven't ever read the comic book so don't really know how it compares to that. As for the dogs you see a little, but it is more hinted at. Shadows and blood splatter and then the dead animals.