It's about time. I've been looking forward to a truly terrible horror movie to tear apart, and this is the perfect one. Bad acting, terrible action, boring unoriginal story....it's got everything.
To start, let me say while I was a fan of the original 30 Days of Night, it was held back by a couple boring lead performances and some terrible dialogue. It's a shame because it's well paced, scary, and has some incredible shots. Which is fairly loyal to the source material. Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's graphic novel still has some of the most amazing art I've ever seen. The stylized panels suggest frightening things well before anything happens. The writing though, is dreadful. I physically cringed reading some of the dialogue, and it told us far more than it should. It was a great concept, illustrated wonderfully, and undone by the writer's love of his own voice. And believe me, I know all about being undone by loving the sound of your own voice.
We weren't off to a good start when the pre-credits sequence just recycled all the best shots from the first movie under terrible, heavy handed narration. Then the credits rolled and I saw Steve Niles credited as a writer, and I got that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. The movie never really got better from that point. Stella, the surviving character from the first film, is going around trying convince people that it wasn't a bad pipeline that killed her town, but vampires. Clearly this doesn't go well. Not with the public, who don't believe her, or the vampires, who want to shut her up. After a strict warning from a vampire lackey in the FBI to stop it, she meets up with some other vampire hunters and decided to kill the queen. Things do not go according to plan.
I've got to get this off my chest. Aliens is a great movie. It's number 2 on my personal list of best films ever made. But just because it was the perfect way to do a sequel once, doesn't mean EVERY FUCKING SEQUEL EVER has to take the same route. Stella doesn't want to go back, but a trained group with weapons convince her and they declare war on the queen. I saw this before, when it was awesome. It's not so much anymore.
Kiele Sanchez, taking over from Melissa George, sleepwalks through her role as Stella. It's a shame cause I dug her in Perfect Getaway last year with Timothy Olyphant. The rest of the cast are a step above Central Casting, but only a small one. Harold Perrineau and Mia Kirschner show up for 5 minutes to lend the movie some credibility but never get it back. The movie is drably shot, and the music is generic industrial nonsense. I'm still not sure what happened in most of the action scenes. The gore is dreadful, ranging from 10 dollar CGI to grape punch for the practical stuff. There isn't any really nudity to speak of either, usually the saving grace in a movie like this. The one sex scene is boring and just left me wondering for the characters thumbs.
To give credit where credit's due though, I did like how they called vampire wannabes 'bug eaters'. That made me smile. And the initiation to be allowed to become a vampire involves ripping someone's throat out with your teeth while still human. I've got to give them props for that, it was clever.
30 Days of Night: Dark Days is not the worst DTV movie I've ever seen, but it's close. A true return to form for terrible video sequels to decent original movies. Even if you find this one playing late at night, just watch infomercial. At least that way, you can pretend Zombie Billy Mays is selling you stuff.
What, too soon?
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