This Movie Sucks (Not Blood)

I saw the new movie 30 Days of Night yesterday evening. Since then, I've been trying to decide whether I would give the movie an F review or not.

On the one hand, I think about the God-awful movie The Hills Have Eyes, and think, well this movie sucked, but did it really suck that bad? On the other hand, I look at some recent movies where I found tiny shreds of quality buried in crap and managed to give the whole effort a D-. Transformers comes to mind. And I definitely found this movie worse than Transformers.

So there you have it. 30 Days of Night is my first F movie in quite a long time. Where to begin with how awful this movie is?

Well, first -- it commits one of the cardinal sin of horror movies (in my book). None of the scares in the movie are generated from genuine suspense. They're all cheap theatrics. Loud noises, jump cuts, crazy sound effects, and musical stings. It takes no skill to make someone jump out of their seat. To make someone sit on the edge of it or shrink back in it? That's true horror.

Second, it commits the cardinal sin of misusing vampires as subject matter, as I just outlined recently in my panning of the new TV series Moonlight -- it features vampires who aren't vampires. They're much much closer to zombies. And what is the rule they break? Apparently, they don't actually need to feed on blood to survive. They just kill because they seem to like it.

Not that this is expressly stated in the movie anywhere, but it's the only way you can interpret the film based on what you're shown. See, this group of about 25 vampires heads north to the most extreme town in Alaska to feast on the locals while the sun is permanently set for a month. The town population during this period of time is 162 people, as stated in the film. This works out to be about 6 people per vampire to feed them for an entire month, or about one kill per vampire every five days. What vampire is going to live off that?

Of course, they don't "ration" like this or anything. Actually, they kill all but about a dozen people in the town on night one. But they're still alive and stalking on night 29, even though it's impossible that any of them has had any blood to drink in weeks.

And it's a good thing they don't actually need to drink blood, because all these vampires are way too stupid to ever get it. Why they don't just burn every supply store in town the second they second they get there is beyond me. Deny all the humans any refuge to help them survive! Instead, they only think of this for the "big climax" of the movie, when the lead vamp informs his followers of the need to kill all the survivors (oh, gee, thanks -- didn't think of that) in this ridiculously crap faux-Carpathian kind of language subtitled with writing so bad, it makes me long for the genius of an episode of Cop Rock.

Dumber still is the fact that not one vampire ever thinks to just follow someone's footprints in the damn snow. Sure, they show us a couple of blizzards in the movie that would obviously obscure any tracks for a brief few hours. But most of the time, the town of Barrow is potrayed as this pastoral winter still life where the cold just hangs there motionless. It ought to be child's play to track everyone to any hiding place.

Though the vampires are consistently dumb, they're not consistently anything else. The movie varies greatly, depending on the needs of what little plot there is. Sometimes, they run fast. Like Six-Million-Dollar-Man fast. Other times, our heroes have no trouble outrunning them. Sometimes, they can't detect someone standing on the other side of a bathroom door. Later, we learn they can actually smell living blood in the air. On and on like this, for two hours.

Even if you could forgive the abounding stupidity and look the other way, there's still nothing in this movie that wasn't done a hundred times better in 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, John Carpenter's The Thing.... take your pick. Even if you're just there for some uber-violence, I'm sure you'd find any random Saw movie more to your tastes.

Absolutely dreadful. Not to be watched under any circumstances.