30 Days Of Night (2007) Dir: David Slade

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Once, when I was about fifteen, I watched the first twenty-or-so minutes of this David Slade directed vampire horror film, before my friends switched it off, and ever since then, I have wanted to watch the rest of it, if at least just to know what happens. The film has a fairly respectable Letterboxd rating, which is nothing to be sniffed at, so I had moderate hopes that I would enjoy myself with it.

The sound mixing was awful. The music was far too loud, in an attempt to create anxiety and fear - an irritatingly common and, in my opinion, lazy filmmaking tactic used by horror filmmakers. To make things worse, the dialogue was comparatively far too quiet, which meant it was impossible to find a comfortable volume to watch the film at, meaning I routinely had to increase and decrease the volume throughout the film - awful.

To add to my annoyance, the dialogue wasn't at all well-written. I found it to be extremely lazy, particularly in regards to the main antagonist of the film, who was terribly constructed all around - the scariest thing about him was how gross his nails looked. In regards to those horror visuals - the blood and gore, it was probably the only bit of the film that looked consistently good. I would have liked it to be a little more goopy - commit to the gruesomeness if that's what you're aiming for - but it did at least look realistic.

The narrative was so drab and trope-ridden - it was pretty diabolical. Almost none of the characters seemed to have any survival instinct, nor any sense at all, for that matter. When characters are so dumb that even I could survive longer than most of them, it's a sign of doing something very wrong. I felt like bashing my head against the wall watching some of the characters attempt to get themselves killed off as quickly as possible. All of this is without mentioning the incredibly predictable finale, which was just irritating, as much as anything else.

Josh Hartnett tried so hard to make his character feel important, to make the plot feel important, and even to elevate the importance of his co-stars, but it was an impossible challenge. There was only so much he could do. He probably saved this film from being totally unwatchable, to be fair to him. He was, by some considerable margin, the best actor in the film, so he had that going for him, at least.

I wanted to care about Melissa George's character a lot more, but the actress was, unfortunately, very forgettable. Only occasionally did she provide some acting that was more notable, but, in fairness, she wasn't helped by just how substandard everything else around her was too, including the writing, which definitely did her no favours.

Danny Huston was, at times, absolutely laughable. He just walked around as though he had accidentally ingested an illegal substance, and was now unsure of where he was. Furthermore, I found his facial expressions utterly hilarious, as Huston wondered about through the snowy nights. This was really not a good performance for the experienced actor, I felt bad for finding it so funny.

Some of the acting from the supporting cast members was really quite poor, and was typified by Ben Foster, whose acting was characterless, dull, and altogether unconvincing. He was joined in mediocrity by the likes of Mark Boone Junior, Mark Randall, Amber Sainsbury, and Manu Bennett, none of whom could make much of themselves in this film either.

Overall, I don't think I was prepared for quite how bad this film would be. I didn't exactly expect a modern horror classic, but this was quite something else entirely. It was terrible, and not just in the way horror films sometimes are where it's poorly written but watchable, this was just a bad experience up and down the table. Even Josh Hartnett trying his hardest to make something of the awful script wasn't enough to save it from being an absolute mess of a vampire horror.