Movie review: 'Fright' night

An Alaska town is besieged by vampires and its snowbound streets run blood red.

By Colin Covert, Star Tribune

Last update: October 22, 2007 - 9:07 AM

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30 DAYS OF NIGHT

3½ out of 4 stars

Rating: R For Strong Horror Violence and language.

The setup: Vampires descend on an Alaska town during its monthlong season of darkness.

What works: A strong performance by Josh Hartnett as the town's overmatched sheriff, and a mood of trancelike dread between the bloodsuckers' staccato attacks.

What doesn't: The timeline could have been used to greater effect.

Great scene: A snowplow vs. vampire showdown, played for real and edited with brutal efficiency.

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The Arctic Circle horror movie "30 Days of Night" is a subzero chiller. The second feature from director David Slade (who gave us 2005's brilliant rape-revenge shocker "Hard Candy") clamps its fangs on your jugular and doesn't stop until the final arterial spray. There's not a moment of camp humor in this striking, excruciatingly scary film; Slade refuses to cut the audience any slack. His vision of a town under siege conjures a mood of apocalyptic anxiety.

The movie begins as the sun goes down and the desolate village of Barrow, Alaska, enters a monthlong nightmare. Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) looks after the residents out of a sense of duty: law enforcement in the town is his family business, and he more or less inherited the post. As the town battens down for a month without contact with the outside world, some unexpected visitors have arrived. An ugly cargo ship is anchored offshore and a tense, wild-eyed emissary (Ben Foster, the psycho gunslinger in "3:10 to Yuma") alarms the regulars at the town's diner by demanding a plate of raw hamburger. The sheriff locks him up, but the prisoner acts as if he has the upper hand, taunting, "That cold ain't the weather. It's death approachin'."

The test of a vampire movie is finding the right balance between innovation and the standard ingredient of the tale. Slade modernizes the story smartly, ditching the supernatural and romantic elements of old-school vampirism. His ghouls make their arrival in an evil-looking cargo ship, an effective update of Dracula's plague-infested schooner, and they themselves are junkie-pale marauders with dark, bottomless eyes and crocodile teeth. Dressed in worn, bloodstained street clothes and communicating in a hoarse, Slavic-sounding language, they could be mutant survivors of some Chernobyl-level disaster. They strike fast and butcher their prey in Grand Guignol style.

Their devastating surprise attack leaves the town a flaming ruin. Slade films the massacre from above, a chilling God's-eye-view of carnage showing us street after street of blood-soaked snow, the kind of bravura visual effect that young directors reach for when they're adapting graphic novels like this one.

The young, unprepared sheriff gathers a cluster of survivors to wait out the invasion hidden in an attic. It's great casting. Hartnett would be out of place playing a hard-edged cop, but as a worrier who wound up on the force almost accidentally, who would agonize over decisions that might kill somebody, he's ideal. When the handful of people he's protecting begin to dwindle, he starts to crack up, and Hartnett doesn't hold anything back. He makes the character's pain so raw and direct that it's painful to behold.

There's a lot of fine acting in this movie, from Mark Boone Junior's turn as a gruff plow driver to the loathsome lead vampire. The role is played by a fairly well-known actor so transfigured by his physical performance and makeup that his name will surprise many viewers when it's revealed in the end credits.

Despite some rough edges -- the chronology could have been used to better effect, and the hero's climactic gambit is a bit of a puzzler -- "30 Days of Night" sparks with crackling energy. It's a symphony of shocks.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186