Monday, October 24, 2016

Harefooted Hallowen: 30 Days of Night

What I Liked: This scene:



What I Didn’t Like: The general premise and the vampire design.  As far as I’m concerned these barley classify as vampires.  Here’s why…

Image result for 30 days of night josh hartnettOverall Impressions: The plot involves a remote Alaskan town where the sun sets and doesn’t rise again for 30 days.  So vampires use this opportunity to take over and massacre everyone.  This may sound silly but what I don’t get is why the filmmakers bothered to have the attacking creatures be vampires and why this whole thing had to take place over 30 sunless days.

One, these vampires never display human emotions.  They’re mindless killing machines looking to tear every person to shreds.  The beauty of a vampire is that there’s still some human part left so there’s plenty of conflict, relatability and trust issues.  When you take that away what makes them any different than zombies or those things from The Descent or the graboids from Tremors or whatever?

Two, the vamps are never in danger.  Since there’s no sunlight, threatening human population or hunters to hide from then I have to ask again, why go with vampires?  You might as well make up some other creature that kills indiscriminately if you’re not gonna play on any of the vampire’s strengths or weaknesses.

Image result for 30 days of night axLastly, the 24/7 nighttime angle doesn’t work if our heroes hide out for almost all of it.  I think the idea was supposed to be that they’re in constant danger for 30 days but that’s not the way they really play it in the movie.  The plot skips ahead a week at a time with the humans seemingly able to get by with no problem for long stretches.  So what’s the point? 

If the film took place during regular day/night cycles and the bad guys were an original type of monster that weren’t sensitive to sunlight the plot would still be exactly the same.

This is a pretty weak vampire film and not a great horror picture in general.  You could do a lot better.

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