30 Days of Night: Critic Reviews

30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

The performers have little to do besides spill and drink blood in this tedious, inconsequential B picture. The sun doesna(TM)t rise nearly fast enough.

Director David Slade is clearly of the opinion that more is more, so there is lots of blood, lots of gore, and lots of vampires in black coats standing around as if auditioning for a remake of the Michael Jackson Thriller video.

30 Days of Night manages to do for the vampire genre what 28 Days Later did for the zombie flick: give age-old monsters a modern-day makeover.

30 Days of Night is the kind of gruesome but entertaining survival guide you pray you never have to follow: how to stop vampires killing you during the darkest days of Alaskan winter.

30 Days is a proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.

The movie's just not very scary.

An anemic adaptation of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's creepy comic series, 30 Days of Night is lighter on horror than it is on inadvertent humor.

Even as stage blood flows like water, this wicked-mean vampire thriller pushes ahead with effective characters, a fantastic visual schema and a terrifying plot.

The problem is structural. After the invasion, we're marooned with the dull survivors.

I have pretty much reached my quota for vampire movies, but I shouldn't hold that against this one. If you haven't seen too many, you might like it.

The script is simple stuff, simpler than the graphic novel, which at least managed to devote a page or two to the vampires' back story.

Feels derivative of 28 Days Later.

A truly terrifying hell-ride through darkness for grownups.

30 Days of Night sparks with crackling energy. It's a symphony of shocks.

This is a full-on, non-stop horror film. You're either on the bus or off the bus. But if you are on, you're hanging on with both hands and your hair flying back for the better part of the movie.

Result is a mixed bag but has a catchy premise and quite enough splatter to satisfy gorehounds.

You could make a horror film with shocking story developments and creepy twists. Or, you could just have monsters with pointy teeth jump into the frame while making loud noises. For the latter, check out the vampire flick 30 Days of Night.

30 Days hangs on a pretty cool conceit.

It's clear the film script has gone through the standard Hollywood death-of-a-thousand-rewrites wringer to emerge as shadow of its former self, drained of much of its creative synergy.

Like most kiddies games, this one starts out fun and then gets tired. Inevitably, that's when Slade tries to revive our interest by upping the gore quotient.

If this is the kind of movie you're looking for, it delivers.

A terrific horror premise goes begging in the garbled Halloween offering 30 Days of Night.

You can only see so many snarling hissy fits by vampires with perpetually bloody chins before they start looking less like monsters and more like ill-tempered circus clowns whose makeup is running.

It's Assault on Precinct 13 meets the The Thing with vampires as the baddies (Can we count the ways director John Carpenter has influenced genre films today?).