30 Days of Night.

"Adapted by the director David Slade from Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's graphic novel about vampires taking over an Alaska town, 30 Days of Night is a series of gory set pieces that seems to have been edited with a meat ax," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "[T]he performers have little to do besides spill and drink blood in this tedious, inconsequential B picture."

"[W]hile Slade confirms (after the sleek but specious Hard Candy) that he knows how to position a camera, he never infuses his tale with any sense of real consequence, killing characters off one by one and indulging in one supremely nasty (and gratuitous) decapitation without ever plumbing intimated moral dilemmas that might have truly turned this carnage horrifying," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Updated through 10/22.

Slade "takes the film adaptation halfway home by getting the look exactly right," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "However, the film runs into problems when trying to expand a concise, gut-punch of a story into an ungainly two-hour narrative, bogged down by perfunctory elements that take the edge off the material."

But Peter Hartlaub, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle finds this a "well-paced and entertaining horror debut... For a movie that is almost entirely devoid of sunlight, a refreshing amount of action takes place in full view of the audience - without any of that shaky camera blood-on-the-lens nonsense that lesser directors use to mask their inability to shoot action scenes. There are close-ups, wider shots and even a sort of Google Earth view of the carnage."

"It's as much a western as it is a horror film, with [Josh] Hartnett as Will Kane and Huston's posse as the evildoers come to do him in," writes Rober (?) in the Voice. "Get it? High Noon, when it's always midnight. Shrug."

"Among the grazing herd of young, virtually transparent Hollywood heartthrobs, Josh Hartnett could probably be voted Least Likely to Have a Reflection in a Mirror," writes John Anderson. "So it's apt that he's in a vampire movie, even one as silly as 30 Days of Night."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "We got Steve Niles, the author of the 30 Days of Night graphic novels that led to the film, to pry open the vault of vampire cinema and pick the best of the best, the bluebloods of bloodsuckers," writes Geoff Boucher. "There are some surprises: William Marshall from Blacula made the list, but there's no Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys? 'Yeah, sorry,' Niles said, 'I draw the line at vampires with mullets. That's like a rule for me.'"

And John Horn meets Slade.

Online listening tip. At IFC News, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss "Vampires Through the Ages."

Update, 10/21: "Whatever power the original comic had, this film adaptation lost it in translation," writes Steven Boone in the Star-Ledger. "Truly laughable vampires, snuff-porn levels of gore and unsubtle, jolt-and-scream direction gradually do this film in."

Update, 10/22: "I like my vampires less feral, but Danny Huston is screamingly funny as the alternately finicky and savage Head Ghoul - he's like something spewed forth from the bowels of the Politburo," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2007 2:26 PM