“Welcome to Barrow. Top of the world.”
It took me a movie to get me to finally pick up the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. I would flip through the book in Titan, and I just couldn’t bring myself to pay 20 bucks for something that looked like so little story. But, lucky me, because the movie was released, they released a cheaper version of the book, so I went ahead and succumbed to the call of the bloody vampire graphic novel. After all, I couldn’t see the movie without reading the source first.
The plot’s pretty much the same in both the graphic novel and the movie. In the small, secluded town of Barrow, Alaska, the residents are battening down the hatches for winter. Many of the residents have moved out to their winter homes out in warmer parts, but the few that remain are in for and even bleaker winter than they expected. There are some unexpected guests coming into town, and they want more than just a room at the bed & breakfast. These guys have big, pointy teeth and are out for a vampiric vacation in the town where for 30 days it’s nighttime, all the time. Will the police chief and his wife be able to save the people and town they love? Will they be able to save themselves?
The art in the graphic novel was bleak and bloody, like what you would expect from a horror comic. It’s all in shades of gray, black, red, and white, scraggly lines and splashes of color. It’s all desperate and full of teeth. The movie’s art direction follows closely to these images, with the computer editing stripping the little color there is in the clothing and atmosphere. It’s a decent replica of the graphic novel – not nearly as close as say, Sin City or 300, but not much is.
The movie deviates a bit from the comic in that it removes a few baddies and adds a few residents for you to care about, bit other than that, it’s pretty close. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are good as the bickering sheriff and his estranged wife. Josh Hartnett’s earnestness plays well, but I would have expected an older actor to play the role. Danny Huston is pretty creepy as the head vampire. This movie relies on a bunch of creepy, toothy atmosphere form his character and it does a pretty good job of it. How cool that Amber Sainsbury showed up – she’s from Hex (a BBC show, think British Buffy) and it’s nice to see her in another role.
Overall, I’d recommend the graphic novel over the movie just because it was a bit more effective. That could also be because I read the comic first and so knew most of the scares and twists in the movie. Either way, both are a good 90 minutes for a horror buff.
Rating: 4 Purrs for both, with plenty of blood for everybody’s thrills and chills
No comments:
Post a Comment