Screamfest LA 2007: 30 Days of Night

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 19, 2007

The cornerstone of this year’s Screamfest film festival in lovely Los Angeles was the much anticipated 30 Days of Night from ever present comic scribe Steve Niles and brought to the screen by David Slade, who is riding his last film Hard Candy straight to the top.

I had the immense pleasure of being tucked away in the corner of Mann’s prestigious Chinese Theater for the red carpet premiere of the film with the likes of Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston and the always interesting Mark Boone Junior. I’m sure more were in attendance, but I wasn’t able to spy anyone else. On to the film!

The town of Barrow, Alaska, is the northernmost town in all of the United States that is about to plunge into 30 days of night. Much of the town heads South for a slightly warmer climate and a touch more light. Staying behind are Eben Oleson, his somewhat estranged wife Stella, and a random handful of oil workers, deputies, and hardmen. Forebodingly, the townspeople are robbed of all their cell phones and satellite phones, which are burnt as part of an apparent prank. But when an entire paddock of sled dogs is found murdered, its more than clear that something wrong is going on. Cue the Stranger.

Ben Foster stars in a fairly minor role that is on of the more memorable performances of the film. I won’t go ahead and spoil anything about him or his performance, but he has, once again, set in my mind as one of the finest upcoming actors of his generation. But despite Foster’s captivating performance, it still felt to me as it took a bit of time before the actual vampires show up. We get teased a few times as a few characters are picked off and Eben starts to realize something is, to say the least, amiss.

When we finally get to the carnage, these few minutes alone are worth it. The darkened figures moving over the white snow, blood showering, pouring, staining, it really is a beautiful sight. But our heroes are, relatively, smart and soon are held up and hiding from the vampires, trying to make it to sunlight. And that’s where I’ll let the synopsis end, of course.

Now, I hate to be the one to do this, but 30 Days of Night is being touted by a lot of people as visionary, groundbreaking, and all sorts of amazing superlatives. The film is far from perfect, in my opinion. It clocks in just shy of 2 hours and you can feel the time. There are a few “What?” moments revolving around character actions and the rules they’ve established for the vampires don’t exactly hold up at all times. UV light definitely hurts them and decapitation should kill them, but that seems to only work on occasion. Josh Hartnett’s performance is acceptable, though he’s never great, I figure he’s good enough. He definitely has his moments and after a slow start I liked his performance more towards the end.

The positives? The look of the film is really nice. I seem to recall hearing about a new film stock being used which allowed for them to capture more light at night, meaning more true night shooting. However, I can’t find my source at the moment, so maybe I’m fantasizing. Either way, the look was great. I liked the look of the vampires, very nice, however I didn’t enjoy their behavior as much. There was of course the fabulous Danny Huston who was frame perfect who actually made a cool, suave vampire monster. These are monsters, not suave dudes in tuxedos, but at times they came off more like a pack of dogs, which didn’t light my fire.

The blood, again, looked great, the violence was pretty harsh, there were a lot of great performances from the minor characters, and the cinematography was top notch. I’m just afraid of people going into this expecting instant orgasm and finding more foreplay. It’s a pretty good movie. It’s an R-Rated horror film and for that I thank it and I hope it does exceedingly well, but for me there were some inconsistencies that brought my overall opinion of it down.

The Upside: Looks Great, Foster and Huston shine.

On the Downside: New take on Vampires is 70% hit, 30% miss.

On the Side: Mick Garris of the Masters of Horror showed up, didn’t like his seat, and promptly left.

Grade: B-