Thirty Days of Night

[spoilers big and small]

Watched the 2009 movie Thirty Days of Night on my PC about a week or so ago while everyone was upstairs dancing to DVR’d episodes of American Idol. I had mixed feelings as I thought about the film over the past few days. Basically it boils down to this: what was good was very, very good, and what was bad was very, very bad.

First thing, it’s a vampire flick. There’s a nebulous, semiformed post deep inside me about our culture’s intense fascination with vampires, but that still needs gestation. As for my personal feelings about vampires, well, I’m pretty much sick of them. Bored of them, to be more precise. Ho-hum and hum-drum.

However, here we’re treated to one of the best premises ever in a vampire movie. The setting is one of those ice-bound towns in northern Alaska, way up in the arctic circle. Now, forget the actual physics of the tilt of the earth forming seasons and all, but in this town every year the sun abruptly goes down one day and stays down for thirty straight days. Get it? Thirty days of night.

That’s the good part. Here's the bad:

A pack of generic vampires descends on the town for a month of feeding. There are basically two types of vampires in Hollywood: brooding pale hunks and sloppy blood-stained hissers. (In other words, Draculas and Nosferatus.) The latter group are found in this movie. They hiss, they screech, they mimic Spielbergian velociraptors. They are superfast and superstrong. They might actually be scary if I hadn’t seen them three or four dozen times before.

The lead vampire was a little bit interesting in that he was not a brooding hunk. He was somewhat on the chubby side, almost nerdish in a way, as if he spent his prior human life as an accountant or an insurance salesman. Ned Ryerson as a vampire. And I also have to give credit to the moviemakers for designing such a unique guttural language for the baddies. Just where the heck do these fanged fellows come from?

There was some cause fer head scratchin’. For instance, why do the vampires slaughter something like seven-eighths of the town the first day? They’re going to be there for a month. Why not capture the townsfolk and put ’em in holding pens until the vamps get hungry? And if it’s thirty days of night at the north pole and the first thing the vampires do is kill all the generators and all the lights and power – how come I can see everything that happens in the street like I’m on some lighted Hollywood soundstage? ... oh.

I also didn’t recall a single church or crucifix in the movie. Odd. Don’t Hollywood vampire fear these blessed items any more? Perhaps they are atheist vampires. Post-modern atheist vampires. That must be it.

Didn’t like the ending, either. Hero has to inject some tainted blood into himself to become a vampire to fight the lead bad guy – kung fu style! And he kills the bad guy by one of those cinematic fist-through-the-mouth-and-out-the-back-of-head punches. This is a vampire movie, right?

Despite all this it was an entertaining and perfectly-paced movie, and there was suspense, particularly in the quiet moments, when the surviving humans are hiding and trying to ... survive. Some of the ploys the vampires use to find their escaped prey were riveting in a nasty and sometimes sickening way. It’s a movie that is true to itself – it does what it needs to do for what it is.

Just wish those vampires weren’t so ... hum-drummingly ho-hum.

Grade: B-minus.