Back in 2007, 30 Days Of Night gave vampires a much needed boot in the scares by adapting the absurdly atmospheric comic book by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith into a film that gave us a far less discreet bloodsucker than we were used to. Displaying huge, shark mouths and delivering ear-piercing screeches when they weren’t pontificating in a strange, guttural language, it was a vampire film that used its killer concept to give us something that we genuinely hadn’t seen before. Weirdly enough, the reaction was frustratingly divided, but as the chainsaw-tooth creatures descended upon an Alaskan town shouded in a month of dark, I was hoping that we’d get more of this type of vamp.
I guess I should’ve been a little more careful about what I was wishing for, because while the team of Niles and Templesmith delivered a comic book sequel, it’s subsequent adaption – like most vampires – shouldn’t have seen the light of day…
A year has passed since the town of Barrow was obliterated by vampires during its month-long polar night and we find one of the few survivors, Stella Oleson, now traveling on some sort of twisted world tour in order to convince the world that the blood drunk creatures exist. While this lonely existence is as dangerous as you’d think, Stella’s self-preservation skills are at a low ebb since the sacrifice of her husband, Eben. However, that doesn’t mean that she’s not cautious and to make her point, as she gives her lectures she has the room equipped with ultraviolet lights that fry any vampires cocky enough to come and listen.
However, if the vampire clans are smart enough to organise an assault on an Alaskan town, they’re certainly smart enough to get one of their devoted human followers (an agent named Norris) to try and intimate her to stop, but after heeding their threats, Stella returns to her hotel room to find a trio of strangers waiting for her. It seems that news of her lectures have reached more than just privacy-hungry vampires as Paul, Amber and Todd have been sent by a mysterious benefactor named Dane to recruit her into their cabal of vampire hunters. Their plan is simple, if they can find and exterminate Lilith, the vampire queen, Dane believes that the bloodsuckers will fall into dormancy and if they can achieve that, then all the various personal loses the quartet have experienced will be avenged.
However, putting that into practice may prove to be a lot more difficult than advertised and the group experience heavy losses due to a lack of teamwork. Worse yet, Stella discovers that under the command of Lilith, the vampires are planning a return trip to Barrow (now renamed Utqiagvik) for another orgy of blood drinking. But while the shaky group try and get their shit together for a second assault, Stella discovers a shocking fact about vampire genealogy that sets her on an even darker path.
On paper, 30 Days Of Night: Dark Days should have been a sure-fire thing. Despite shifting thr action from the novel locale of Alaska to the far more conventional Los Angeles, the original comic still came loaded with buckets of dread as the inky blacks and snowy whites of Barrow got swapped out for the murky oranges of the city of angels. On top of that, we get more chapters in the continuing story of Stella Oleson and a deeper look in how the vampire hierarchy works – but regrettably, these vamps ultimately come up against something far more formidable than small arms fire and UV lamps. Stopping these razor-toothed predators in their tracks is that classic conundrum that comes with a direct to DVD sequel that wants to expand the universe, but has to try to achieve it with only a fraction of the budget.
That’s right, rather than cutting their loses, 30 Days Of Night becomes the latest casualty of making a cinema dodging sequel to a far more ambitious film, as director Ben Ketai simply doesn’t have the skills to deliver a worthy follow up. Back in the original, we had an entire town to play with, not to mention an approach to vampirism that was brutally unique and – more importantly – legitimately scary. Also driving the point home deeper than a stake through the heart is that even though the characters of Stella and Eben Oleson appear, both Melissa George and Josh Hartnett are nowhere to be seen which proves to be more distracting than you’d think. Not to shit on Kiele Sanchez – who does her best – but the change in actress just makes the film seem cheap and also, a lot of the expansion of the lore seem half-baked and painfully convenient. While the original kept the vampires as unknowable horrors with their own laws and languages, Dark Days merely makes them goth attired cannon fodder, like the xenomorphs from Aliens have been shopping in Hot Topic.
Those razor sharp gnashers are still impressive and the gore flows like a leaky faucet, but David Slade’s sharp, frosty visuals have just been replaced by a dull, dreary dinge that looks like a million other rushed horror flicks released over the past decade. Worse yet, the humans and the vamps both prove to be shockingly boring with one side a bunch of bickering cardboard cutouts only separated by their tragic stories and the other reduced to one-dimensional ghouls with a really stupid hierarchy. If Mia Kirshner’s Lilith really is the turn-off switch for the entire clan, why would she risk showing up in person at all? Similarly, the sub-plot of “good” vampire Dane is first poorly explained and then utterly discarded without ever approaching anything close to a point. Surely the fact that one of these creatures is able to cling on to his humanity should be a massive plot point, but Dark Days barely broaches it and is content to leave its potentially most interesting aspect to bleed on the floor.
Still, credit where it’s due, Dark Days doesn’t pull its punches with it’s violence or its downbeat ending. There’s a neat moment where a victim has their tooth pulled out in order for a vampire to drink their blood while kissing and there’s a few good decapitations and skull smooshes to keep undemanding gorehounds happy – but the second the movie reveals that dead vamps can be resurrected by pouring blood in their mouth and that Lilith is planning another jaunt to Alaska, you know exactly where the film is eventually going to go.
If, for some reason, this fairly derivative swing at a vampire franchise has given you a thirst for more entries on the franchise, Dark Days was preceeded by a couple of web series both titled Blood Trails and Dust To Dust; but if you want my honest opinion on the expanded adventures of this particular breed of saber-toothed bastards, stick solely to Barrow.
Whatever promise lay in Steve Niles’ savage comics and David Slade’s enjoyably vicious first movie is rapidly undone by a dull, repetitive and somewhat muddled follow up. 30 Days Of Night? Try 92 minutes of shite. Dark days indeed…
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