30 Days of Night (2007)

30 Days of Night is a painfully long, painfully boring film with nothing to offer to any horror fan, or indeed film fan, because we've all seen this a million times before. Sure, it has a brilliant premise - a group of vampires prey upon an isolated Alaskan town which, due to its geographical position, endures 30 days of straight darkness in the winter- but it wastes it. Somewhere with no sunshine whatsoever for a month sounds like a prime location for an all-you-can-eat vampire banquet; the film should also be given points for trying to make vampires into big scary monsters again, instead of faintly effeminate angstmongers. But unfortunately, that's all that's good about it.

Despite the obvious superficial differences, the snowy Alaskan landscape might as well be random woodland. An isolated house is an isolated house, no matter what the weather's like outside the window; the climate isn't relevant to the plot, even though it should have been. The vampires could easily be swapped out for zombies, or cannibalistic rednecks. The idea, brilliant though it was, isn't exploited to its full extent; or, indeed, at all. 30 Days of Night is survival horror, plain and simple. It doesn't deviate from the formula at all, except to throw in some really random deus ex machina ending that makes no sense whatsoever, and to blip through extended periods of time pointlessly with no indication what happened in between. The 30 days of the title might as well be just one night, for all the thought that's gone into pacing this film.

If you've never seen a survival horror movie before, knock yourself out. If you have, there's nothing new here, and the tired old formula isn't even done well enough to be worth sitting through it again.

(Plus, can people please stop casting Melissa George in horror movies? She's so incredibly boring it's like there's a black hole of nothingness right through the middle of the film where a character should be.)

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