I often have a pretty bleak outlook on humanity. Sometimes I see the evil that we do and I know what we're capable of ad it makes me despair. But seeing a movie like this, where even the worst of humanity looks like sainthood next to an evil creature like the vampires in this movie...I get the idea that we're not so bad (or like Hemingway said, that we're "worth fighting for," and sometimes that's enough). One of the first things I noticed about the vampires in this movie is that they walk around with blood dripping and solidifying on their faces. I realize even as I'm typing this how incredibly ridiculous it must sound, but it's one of the main things that illustrates their inhumanity to me. The human nature in me cringed at the thought of having blood running down my face, into my eyes, and not even trying to wipe it off; it seriously bothered me in every scene and got under my skin.

It's as if these creatures are incapable of feeling anything (even the sensation of solidifying blood on their faces) and they walk around with these bloody faces making inhuman animal-like sounds to communicate with each other instead of words, and it made me cringe. Though their shape is somewhat human, there is nothing human about the way they act. They run and leap from building to building with spider-man like reflexes and no dainty fang marks on necks here, these vampires tear into their victims' flesh and have a party, spewing grue all over the place in the process. It's disgusting and yet satisfying for the gore fan in me to see this portrayal of evil creatures running blood-crazed around a small town making a smörgåsbord out of its residents. With all due respect to a certain vampire slayer (and though I dearly love and own every season of her show) these vampires would break into her world and destroy those pansy-ass vampires in a matter of minutes. These creatures are the real deal. Not to be outdone, the human characters hold their own and manage to make the events compelling, as we actually give a shit if they live or die. Each of the main characters is developed in big and small ways that makes me care about them, and that's refreshing in a time of disposable characters and threadbare plots.

Thus this is the perfect town for a bloodthirsty horde of crazed vampires to descend upon and wreak havoc. In early scenes of the movie vehicles are damaged, phone lines cut, and even a scene of extreme animal cruelty isn't gratuitously wasted, as the dogs that are killed are sled dogs and thus another way of escape that is denied the residents. Not that the town doesn't have its share of personal and deep emotional problems before the undead set upon them. In our small cast of main characters, there are failing marriages, abusive relationships, a few widows and widowers, a mentally unstable man and his weary son...a mess of trouble that displays plenty of volatile potential as the characters become increasingly isolated and desperate. As with the best apocalyptic and zombie films, the characters at first band together and then start to turn on each other, degenerating into the worst of human behavior and giving ample opportunity for the evil to claim them all one by one.

Though the characters make some seriously stupid moves they also do some inventive things that impressed me, and the resulting mayhem is highly entertaining. When these vampires "turn" a person into one of their own, watching that person's humanity slowly draining away and being replaced by cold, unthinking evil is powerful to watch. And the movie has balls; it doesn't shy away from showing some horrible things that other movies avoid. For instance, even little children aren't immune from the supernatural evil in this movie, and unlike movies that cast a magical spell of protection upon their main characters, all bets are off in this movie and the audience is never sure who will survive and why, because this rebellious little slice of vindictive horror doesn't play by the rules. The audience I watched the movie with got up and walked out at intermittent times (some of them couldn't stand the animal cruelty, some didn't like a plotline following a character's family, and some of them just didn't like the gore, period).

I'm always impressed when a movie can make people walk out and forfeit their money. That is impressive for me (and I really don't know who thought a vampire flick called "30 Days of Night" would be a good family film anyway, but that's another rant). Having survived many whiteout storms and blackout nights in cold drafty places myself, I admired the palpable atmosphere of this film. In general, I was highly impressed with most aspects of this film, and the few caveats did nothing to ruin my enjoyment because the characterization, exquisite gore, and evil sense of impending doom won me over at every term. As soon as the movie was over, I wanted to watch it again, and to me, that says it all.

The vampires speak in their weird feral-animal like language, as previously stated, so here are helpful subtitles at the bottom of the screen explaining to the audience what they're saying. But the problem is that the human characters speak with sometimes very heavy accents, ad at two key moments in the movie I couldn't understand what the hell they were saying and thus I was completely confused and pissed off. I'll enjoy buying the DVD and watching the movie with subtitles to see what I missed, but I wish the sound hadn't crapped out like that. I almost didn't bring it up because it's a small caveat, but since it happens at two very important scenes in the movie and is therefore EXTREMELY annoying, it would behoove the filmmakers to make their mush mouth actors speak more clearly in the future.

Why can't I ever like a movie that everyone else likes? Why must I forever be cursed with loving movies other people hate? And it's not just the movie as a whole people seem to be picking apart, I've heard over ten people complain about the ending and other specific scenes that I loved and found extremely effective. Such is life I guess. For my money (and a full price movie ticket ain't cheap these days) this is one of the goriest and most ballsy movies I've seen in quite awhile and it's definitely worth seeing.

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