30 Days of Night

[edison]

In a sleepy, secluded Alaska town called Barrow, the sun sets and doesn't rise for over thirty consecutive days and nights. From the darkness, across the frozen wasteland, an evil will come that will bring the residents of Barrow to their knees. The only hope for the town is the Sheriff (Josh Hartnett) and Deputy (Melissa George), a husband and wife who are torn between their own survival and saving the town they love.

David Slade (Hard Candy) will direct the horror film, produced by Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures. The studio is eyeing an October 19, 2007 US release.

From the graphic novel by Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith

[edison]

Webisodes have started on the production:

http://ghosthousepictures.comingsoon.net/latest_news.php?viewby=13

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: October 19th, 2007 (wide)

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Jon Bennett, Mark Boone Junior
 
Directed by: David Slade 

Premise: In Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the U.S, the winter sun sets and does not rise for 30 days and nights. From the darkness comes an evil force that strikes terror on the town, and all hope is pinned on a husband-and-wife cop team.

[modage]

josh hartnett has become a real deterrent for me lately but that looks good.  the beginning actually gave me a jolt.  we can now start taking bets on whether this will be better than Will Smith's movie or not.

[w/o horse]

It's more an action film than a horror film.  There's screaming and bloodshed and small children but they're just happening.  Lots of those jump scares.

It looks really, really good.  You can say about these Raimi horror films that they all are like the best looking horror films, from a production standpoint, that are coming out these days.  And this one is by far the most impressive.

[modage]

i really want to see this but the reviews have not been terribly kind.  still, its October and it looks like this is my best bet to see a horror film in the theatre...

[Gamblour.]

Brilliant idea and the poster looks like a Brian Michael Bendis graphic novel. Can't wait to see it. (sequel about vampires stuck in Alaska during the light part of year? existential comedy? I should write that)

[modage]

this isn't very good. 

in a way i'm torn because its a great concept, its an original idea, it was a noble attempt to re-invent the vampire and yet i just can't give it a pass.  the film starts out with promise but quickly deteriorates.  the problems:

josh hartnett is a vacuous screen presence.  devoid of interest or charm or the ability to hold your attention for 2 hours, without him the movie might have had a chance.  just imagine The Thing-era Kurt Russell in this role, now you see what i'm talking about?

the film builds no tension.  the way the vampires are shown attacking mysteriously in the beginning of the film never progresses.  it becomes a 2 hour loop of the same thing happening over and over.  you get no sense of the passage of time, other than the titles and Josh Hartnetts patchwork facial hair there would be no way to distinguish this was not happening over one evening.  in most films you would think the group of survivors would have a plan at some point as to how to defeat them but this group never does.  they just wait it out, but its too long and unsuccessful as a survivor film either.  the characters also make some inexplicable decisions such as driving your deathmobile purposefully into a buliding when you could kill more vampires with it. 

SO a disappointment, and one that i mostly place on the director for mishandling the tone and casting the lead.  i don't hate it, but its a frustratingly missed opportunity.

[squints]

what a shame. the book was great.

[Stefen]

GN was excellent.

I can't take Mod's review seriously because I have a feeling his Hatred of Hartnett may be clouding his judgment. What the fuck did he ever do to you?

[john]

There were elements of this film that were much better than I expected, but they didn't add up to much.

It's always a pleasure to watch Mark Boone Junior, and I've been enjoying Ben Foster's work - even in something as thin as this.

Mostly it disappointed me that this is, essentially, the centerpiece film at theatres for the Halloween season and it doesn't even have a that great, or enjoyably bad,  horror film feeling.

Saw 4 is an institute, and an increasingly cheap and repetitve one at that. Resident Evil 3, like the others, is more an action film - an uninteresting action film.

Too bad Warner Brothers went with the absurd move to delay Trick or Treat - from the preview, it seemed to have great potential for being a decent halloween film for, you know, halloween.

Actually, this film seems to represent something more duplicitous and commonplace - loading a film up with half-decent talent, flashy cinematography, a score by Brian Reitzell, and trying to trick the public into it being scary or well-done. Just like plenty of television shows right now. Sure, they're nice enough to look at... but who gives a fuck?

[w/o horse]

  My console (intellectualy) has come from the non-cinephile crowd of my friends, and it's the more horror avid that I consider the legimate pool, who have fealt equally with me that the film is loaded with the sensational and not with the genuine.  It senses what is most abrasive but not what is most cunning, or permanent, and whatever specific point you identify as its downfall (I think Kurt Russell in any era would only solidify its speciousness) the glaring incapability of the film is its degenerative understaning of the audience.  The post-modern aspect here is that the audience sees the heads roll while theirs remain very stable.

[MacGuffin]

I'm in total agreement with mod's review. The premise is perfect for a vampire flick, but after that's established, nothing scary or new happens. It felt like it was just going through the motions. The movie did nothing to get across the idea that the humans were trapped and had to survive for a month; it all played like one night. It's nothing that Dawn Of The Dead or John Carpenter's Assault On Precinct 13 have done better.