30 DAYS OF NIGHT Film Review - 23/11/07

Starting off feeling very much like "The Thing" in it's isolated landscape with an eerie air of foreboding as the sun dips below the horizon for the next month and the inhabitants of an outpost town out in the snowy wastelands soon have more than the cold to deal with. A stranger turns up and systematically cuts the town off from outside communication piece by piece. Then shapes appear speeding out of the gloom and snatching and savaging people one by one. The menace gets stronger and the fear factor builds as the town's power & lights fail and then suddenly "30 Days Of Shite" (Ooops! "Night") falls totally flat. All the cliches are there among it's good points as the townsfolk (Extras with no-names destined as slaughter victims) play cat and mouse and string this out for over 2 hours. The top-notch effects are superb from the sinister looking vampires that seem partly human & partly animal with razor sharp teeth and claws with a guttural language partly of shrieks and cries. Several decapitations and body parts are strewn around - But the story just doesn't make any sense? In fact it's: Vampires close off town, vampires eat people, vampires leave. Having not read the graphic novel this film is based on I cannot comment on the book and the ending will leave you gobsmacked (...and not for the right reasons!) Having spent a lot of cash on this film I feel it was a wasted chance for something better and leaves too many questions that a good film should have answered. At least I got to see the new Trailer for "Alien Versus Predator Requiem" so it wasn't an entire loss!