30 Days of Night
If you're a vampire, I suppose, finding the right vacation spot can be a pain in the neck. So many variables to consider: an absence of sunlight, hot and cold running blood, beach access. For the undead in "30 Days of Night," the town of Barrow, Alaska, has everything but the latter. Two out of three ain't bad.
Based on a 2001 graphic novel, "30 Days" is a proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well. It'll freak out teenage first-timers sneaking in under the R rating, even if wizened gorehounds who know their vampire-movie history will stick with 1987's "Near Dark," still the final word in postmodern Nosferatus.
The concept is as elegantly simple as the film's desaturated color scheme. Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States, is plunged into darkness one month each winter, when the sun dips below the horizon and doesn't come back. The road and the airport are closed; the reduced population hunkers down and waits. For a coven of vampires, Barrow presents an all-you-can-eat buffet.
For the locals, led by Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett, looking more than ever like a fetal Tommy Lee Jones), it's wholesale slaughter followed by 3 1/2 weeks of hide and seek. "30 Days" builds slowly and eerily to an early pitch of cover-your-eyes carnage, as Eben drives around on the last day of sunlight discovering evidence that something is planning entrapment. The sled dogs have been killed; cellphones have been collected and burned. (How? Don't ask.) A wild-eyed drifter (Ben Foster, reprising his "3:10 to Yuma" crazy act as the movie's Renfield) arrives in town muttering dire warnings.
Then night falls and the undead emerge: freakish and dark-eyed, dressed in fashionable black, with rows of dessicated dental work. They speak in shrieky vampirese and their features don't quite make sense, as if drawn by a comics artist who hadn't finished the correspondence course. And they're fast. They pull you under a house and chomp through your carotid before you've even been properly introduced.
So far so ghoulishly good, and the leader of the vampires looks so remarkably like Danny Huston that you realize with a start it is Danny Huston, slumming with playful B-movie nihilism. As the movie settles down and the dark days roll on, "30 Days" becomes a fairly dull 10-little-Alaskans suspense film, with Eben and the other survivors crawling from house to house, trying to avoid detection.
The group's awfully standard: a raw kid, an old coot, a blowhard chicken, a noble ethnic, an anonymous girl, and Stella (Melissa George), the lissome county fire marshal and Eben's estranged wife. Apparently the undead have their uses in the marriage-counseling department, too.
The director is David Slade, whose previous movie, the controversial low-budget drama "Hard Candy," was in many ways scarier than anything he gets up to here. But "30 Days of Night" is stylish in a doomy, shallow, graphic-novel way, and despite regular dips into gore its better moments are quiet ones: a lone woman calling for help on Main Street while dark figures move just out of sight on the surrounding rooftops. They've staked her out as bait. If you've never seen a vampire movie before, feel free to bite.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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