A lot of people won't like 30 Days of Night. It's a vampire movie, for one thing, a genre in which the crap ratio is very high. But occasionally somebody makes a good vampire film, either as an enlightened B movie or as an indie. I'm not sure which one 30 Days of Night is. It feels like a little of both.
Aside from allergy to sunlight, there's little concern here with the biology of vampirism, or any of the fetishistic rules that vampire romance fans obsess over like Dungeons and Dragons rules geeks or baseball stats geeks. These vampires f---ing KILL YOU. They don't patiently exsanguinate you. They don't seduce you. They don't wait to be invited in. They don't turn into bats or control rats. They don't turn you into a vampire in order to carry on some weird pseudoerotic don't touch me mindscrew.
If you like movies where that stuff happens, you probably won't like this one, because for the protagonists, the point is to kill and or avoid the vampires, not to experience erotic tension with them. And they take some killing. They're not Buffy-style martial arts vampires, but they're pretty tough, and though this film is apparently based on a comic book, physics is pretty much earth normal here aside from some crazy vampire jumping. If you're cutting off a head with an ax, for instance, it doesn't go flying, Green Knight style ... it takes a few swings.
I,uh, assume that's realistic, but I don't have a whole lot of basis for that assumption.
2 comments:
And once in awhile, someone writes a great vampire book. See Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilightseries.html
I'll take your word for it. This line from her website gives me pause: "As you might have guessed from the length of my book, I can't tell a short story—this is going to take a while. You have been warned.)"
My daughter, who reads the vampire romance junkre, read the first of these and didn't like it, which is probably a point in its favor.
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