30 Days of Night (2007)

This ain't your mama's vampire movie, that's for sure.

Despite temptations to the contrary, I won't be writing the whole review in dialect. I will, for fair warning, be praising director David Slade and the source comic's author Steve Niles for their inventiveness within the vampire genre. I will also be lamenting a paradoxical lack of originality with regard to a few cliche characterizations and lack of decent thrills.

The premise of the film is maddeningly (in a "Why didn't I think of that?" way) simple: in Barrow, Alaska, the sun sets for thirty days of night. Marauding (possibly nomadic?) vampires, led by the vicious Marlow (Danny Huston), take this opportunity to pillage and plunder and all that gory stuff. It's up to Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his wife Stella (Melissa George) to lead the survivors through the month-long night.

That's one of the major innovations of the movie. Vampire flicks heretofore had felt a little like the George Carlin cliche of westerns - that the whole film showed the cowboys preparing for the Indian assault. Ditto for vampire flicks, where the prime objective was to build up to a vampiric confrontation. Here, though, the object of the game is to survive, to ride out the long night in the hope that the sunlight will kill the vampires. And if we have to fight the vampires... well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Perhaps the most stark twist Niles & Co. have added to the vampire story is the way in which the vampires are fought. No, I'm not referring to the use of ultraviolet lamps to repel the bloodsuckers (creative as that is) but to the climactic confrontation between the humans and the vampires - which, unfortunately for completion's sake, would be criminal to spoil herein.

Though the plot has a lot of twists that lovers of the vampire tradition have never seen before, most of the characterizations of the survivors are as familiar as your father's cologne. Josh Hartnett again plays the tough brooding pseudo-loner, something he's been doing for quite some time. Melissa George (who I've adored since her Season Three stint as Vaughn's wife on Alias) is serviceable as the sheriff's wife, but I wish the writers hadn't dragged us through the "spouses about to separate reunite in the midst of disaster" storyline.

Indeed, the only characterization that really seems to get off the ground is Danny Huston's completely immersed portrayal of head vampire Marlow. Everything from the walk to the facial posturing (a perma-open mouth with fangs dripping blood) down to the language that Huston developed screams "vampire!" There are a few moments where Huston's performance made me sit up a little straighter and even feel a little quiver of terror in my stomach. Recall the way Johnny Depp stepped full-force into the shoes of Captain Jack Sparrow, and you'll be pretty near the mark of Huston's performance (although it's tough to match the Depp=Sparrow formula).

I realize it seems silly to dwell on acting and characterization in a horror movie, since the real stars are jump moments and arterial sprays - the latter of which 30 Days of Night delivers in abundance. Certainly there are few jump moments in the film, disappointing after the pulse-pounding rhythm of The Descent. The gore comes hard and fast, though, especially once the survivors realize the only sure way to kill these bloodthirsty vampires is decapitation. When a little girl wanders into the streets, covered in blood, her physical appearance on an abandoned avenue is more startling than the blood all over her face. Even the film's final battle has a gory moment beyond any "I've never seen that before" sentiment the movie generates.

As vampire movies go, this is a pretty clever take on the old tradition. Consider how Spider-Man changed the comic book genre - 30 Days of Night does the same for the vampire movie (at least, I hope it does). If it's a great work of film you're looking for, this probably isn't the right place to search, but as vampire movies go, you'll have a bloody good time.