30 Days of Night

Spiderman and X-men were cool but not as cool as V for Vendetta or 300. The number of good movies adapted from comic books seems to be increasing every month, and the lesser known non-superhero title really shows everyone what a good story is really like. This month, we can add 30 Days of Night to the list.

Lying quietly in Alaska is the northern most town in US, Barrow which during the winter, faces 30 days of darkness. A group of vampires take the opportunity to hunt.
When I first read the sypnosis when the comic book first came out, I quickly thought that that was brilliant and wondered how noone ever thought of it earlier. This will be the time when the vampires can hunt freely and openly without the worries of sunrise. 720 hours to hunt and with the town communication disabled and all means of tranportation destroyed, the entire town is doomed to die feeding the vampires' hunger (or is that thirst?). And the entire town's population amount to 120 plus after a bigger majority whom left for other parts in the country to avoid these dark period. In the end, the vampires only need to burn the whole town down and noone will be able to suspect what really went on.
The vampires actually has the help of a normal human, except this is a scumbag of a human, who went into town earlier to steal and destroy all satelite phone, kill all sledge pulling dogs and damage the town's only helicopter. His reason to help these predators is he was promised to be made one of them. He didn't get his wish.
Josh Harnett played the town sheriff who initially hoped to to capture these perpetrators but upon understanding what he is facing, contented with just leading a group of survivors from their clutch, a role that he surprising, played effectively. There is only a handful of the survivors left at the end, with the sheriff making a final sacrifice to prevent the vampires from destroting all evidence.
I managed to predict how the story will conclude but I still enjoyed the whole movie. It was quite horrifying when the vampires started unleashing their terror as their intention is apparently not just to feed but also to terrorise. They don't get such chances very often, when they are in control of an entire town. The people are brave but not stupid brave and they know the best way to survive is to hide until the sun rise.
30 days later.
The vampires weren't given much of a background but it was enough actually. Aliens and predators didn't started off in the screen with much of a background either. One clear difference of these modern vampires compared to the tradisional ones is that they do not have 2 long fangs. They have a whole row of them in their mouth. The better to bite you with, dear.
The movie can get frightening but it was not scary as in horror scary. I am never quite shaken with physical horror. After all, anything that has a physical body is something that can be fought. Still, the director managed to keep the excitement and suspense up and the characters were quite likable. A worthy movie with decent story to be watched in the theater.