Loganotron

Oh.
My.
Guh…

Dangermarc and I just watched 30 Days of Night at the Metreon. I haven’t been that scared since the first time I saw Britney Spears vagina. In all seriousness, this movie scared this shit out of me. Dangermarc convinced me to see it, since he’d been a big fan of the comic. I went in with low expectations because 1) Josh Hartnett was the lead star, and 2) it got 51% or Rottentomatoes.com. The movie blew my pre-judgements out of the water.

First let me say that Josh Hartnett is getting damn fine as he gets older. And, his acting wasn’t atrocious in this movie. The love story between him and his estranged wife gets a little sappy at points, but he impressed me nonetheless.

One thing that I loved was the way the director totally fakes you out. All the traditional “oh my god this is gonna be a scary scene” moments happen. The thing is, none of them result in a big scare. It’s totally when you don’t expect it, when you’ve let your guard down, that the scare slams you in the face. What’s also nice is that they don’t use the same scare tactic more than once. The ever changing scare tactics and the well executed fake-outs kept me shaking for an hour and a half.

I absolutely loved the vampires. They reminded me of Nosferatu. They didn’t speak English, but instead seemed to communicate with screeches. There also wasn’t any attempt to explain their motivation. We learn that they’ve been slaughtering for centuries and that they consider humans to be weak and worth of destruction. But the explanation of their motivation ends there. Instead we just see them as hell bent on slaughter and annihilation, and that is sufficient to make them terrifying.

[Major Spoiler Alert...]

The final thing I loved about this movie is that the good guy dies in the end. He sacrifices himself to save his wife and the rest of the survivors. This involves him injecting vampire blood into his arm so that he’ll start turning into a vampire and thus have the strength to fight the vampire baddies. In the end, the sun comes up with Josh and his wife sitting watching the sunrise over the bay. She holds him tight as he begins to incinerate and turn to dust. I was so relieved that they didn’t suddenly discover some way to cure him, or that because he hadn’t fully turned he would be okay and revert back to human. It was refreshing to see the good guy to actually die for his sacrifice. You don’t see that so often in today’s movies. (Although in 300, another recent movie based on a dark comic, the hero(s) also sacrifice their lives to protect their homeland. Hey Hollywood: Maybe there’s something to this whole heroes dying through sacrifice thing!)

This wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen. But, it was far better than the 50% that it received on RT. My heartbeat didn’t slow down for at least half an hour after the movie ended. That qualifies as a good scary movie in my book.