Film

The premise of 30 Days had us slapping our foreheads and saying “Why didn’t we think of that?!?” Just as Barrow, Alaska, is plunged into its yearly monthlong stint of darkness, a pack of vampires descends on the town and starts thinning the human herd. Brilliant, elegant premise. But horror films have annoyed us lately, more invested in gore than scares, so we went in cautiously optimistic. 30 Days is neither as bad as we feared nor as good as we hoped.

In a hilariously unhinged turn, Foster plays Renfield to these modern-day Draculas, hoping the vampires will make him one of them. But the closest we get to a Van Helsing is the overworked sheriff, Eben (Hartnett, bland as ever), and he’s not particularly heroic. He, his ex-girlfriend (George), and a few others hole up in an attic and try to figure out some way to either escape or fight back. Slade is smartly economical about characterization, knowing as we do that most of these people are basically vampire-chow.

The director doesn’t shy away from the inevitable echoes of John Carpenter’s The Thing, though his aspirations are much more basic: This is a flick that revels in spurting blood and exposed viscera more than slow-simmering dread. By the end of the first hour, though, the seams start to show; big leaps in the plot suggest there’s a fair amount of material on a cutting-room floor somewhere. Even a vampire movie ought to make sense.