30 Days of Night

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Pulp fiction, particularly in comics, has come a long way from its fringe, cult following in the 1950’s. Since the 1980’s, it’s gained a huge following and has been elevated to a much more acceptable and highly arty place in the traditionally geeky world of comics.

It’s already proven to make a successful transition in the world of film with adaptations of such pulp graphic novels as Sin City, The History Of Violence, V For Vendetta, and 300. Now Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures attempts to creates another successful graphic novel-based film with this adaptation of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days Of Night, now available on DVD.

The town of Barrow of Alaska is incredibly frigid and is in the middle of a monthly period of continual night. Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett), while dealing with problems in his marriage with wife Stella (Melissa George), patrols the area and begin to notice some strange occurrences going on in the town.

As the temperature drops and night falls, things start to get even more unusual when some sled dogs are massacred and a mysterious, eccentric stranger (Ben Foster) begins threatening the locals as a would-be prophet of doom. However, the stranger’s prophecy proves to be more than the mere ranting and ravings of a lunatic when some ghastly vampires emerge to feast on everyone in their path.

Hard Candy director David Slade undoubtedly attempts to impress with this film adaptation of the graphic novel. While he certainly gives it his all, it does little to mask how flat, incoherent, and ultimately tedious 30 Days Of Night is.

Slade provides plenty of very frightening vampires, but his attempts to create unsettling atmosphere with edgy camera tricks shrouds it continuously into an incoherent fog. But not helping things here most of all is the script.

The heroes, played by a marginal cast led by the particularly wooden Josh Hartnett, and the vampires, while mostly played with great relish, are all one-dimensional and flat characters. As a result, at the core of all great gore and make-up effects is a very consistently pedestrian approach across-the-board in both story and characters, which sinks this film’s enjoyment factor quite a bit.

The DVD’s picture quality is in the 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with the sound quality in Dolby Digital Surround 5.1. The DVD also comes packed with plenty of special features.

The first is audio commentary with actors Josh Hartnett and Melissa George and producer Rob Taper, which provides plenty of humor and information on the film. Also included are eight fairly standard behind-the-scenes featurettes that tap into different aspects of the film’s production, including pre-production, the creation of the town, the look, the make-up and gore effects, the stunts, the vampires, shooting at night, and finally the casting.

Rounding off the special features is the first episode of the Japanese anime TV series Blood +, seen on Adult Swim. This inexplicable feature wreaks of nothing ...