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30 Days of Night

Hoary high-camp clichés

By PETER KEOUGH | October 17, 2007

1.5 Stars

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“We should have done this ages ago!” howls a vampire in Dave Kane’s adaptation the graphic novel. Indeed they should have — the folks in Hollywood, that is. What better place to put a horde of the blood-starved, photophobic undead than in Barrow, Alaska, during the frozen outpost’s month-long winter darkness? No longer restrained, they go nuts, embarrassing themselves with their witless excess. So do the filmmakers, whose sado-porn-inspired spatterings can’t disguise a patchwork of hoary, high-camp clichés. As the sun sets, local sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) tosses a Renfield-like Stranger (Ben Foster) in jail as a suspect in recent cases of vandalism. But the Stranger is just easing the way for a platoon of revenants sharing the hyper-kineticism of the 28 Days Later school of zombie-ism but none of the creepiness. Poor Danny Huston leads them; his hissed Nietzschean ripostes are tiresome and laughable, leaving him about as scary as Count Chocula.

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