|
| 
 enlarge | Director: David Slade
Actors: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Rendall
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: $28.95
Buy Used: $3.44
You Save: $25.51 (88%)
New (50) Used (77) Collectible (5) from $3.44
Rating:  205 reviews
Sales Rank: 1254
Format: Ac-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 99
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 113 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.7
MPN: 19615
UPC: 043396196155
EAN: 0043396196155
ASIN: B00111YM5Q
Theatrical Release Date: October 19, 2007
Release Date: February 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Had a lot of potential...but August 1, 2008
Jossher700 (Clark, NV)
It started out well. It had a lot of promise. Reminds you of "The Thing." As one of the reviewers said, the bird's eyeview shots were great and the redness of the blood contrasted well with the snow...until the vampires showed themselves fully. In my case, that could be forgiven. Although Danny Houston ("Marlowe") could have used more make up. They had a lot of bald vampires which reminds you of Nosferatu or Mr. Barlow from Salem's lot. The girls made to walk on the snow as baits was pretty clever. The vampires standing on the roofs was pretty cool. However, Vampires are supposed to be afraid of fire. I could not understand why Marlowe started to burn the town. I thought it was the way to get Melissa George's (who's the splitting image of Olivia d'Abo [Wonder Years]) character from under the house. If that was the case, then the vampires could have easily taken her from under the house as they previously did in an earlier scene. Also, if Josh Harnett's character knew the way to kill them is to cut of their heads, why didn't they get more axes from the hardware store for his companions to use? But what killed the story was when Josh Hartnett had to become a vampire to defeat the vampires. That was just too "Buffy the Vampire Hunter" (the TV show not the movie) and it just made the story a little corny.
 What happened to the story? July 31, 2008
Blue Subie (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania United States)
First, the plus side:
GREAT audio mix. If you have a Dolby EX capable receiver with at least 5.1 speakers, you'll get a more than decent mix of effects from different speakers. It's almost a 'show-off'DVD.
Nice effects, good gore, with little to no CGI.
Minus Side:
Logic gaps you could plow a bulldozer through. Barely linear editing in action scenes, and characters that were barely introduced suddenly getting plenty of screen time in the last ten minutes.
I got angry watching the stupidity of the script unfold; lots of money put into the production, but barely any thought put into the script. For example: if the vampires were attacking outlying towns for centuries, how come they don't put a stakeout (no pun intended) on the town general store/grocery? How does a vagrant suddenly appearing in a town of about 200 steal a pile of cell phones? How can a group surviving for weeks in safety have absolutely no decent game plan for going outside? argh.
Not a vampire movie at all . . . July 28, 2008
W. Koenigsmann (Northern Hemisphere)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A very lackluster and dull film. First of all, the plot is incredibly redundant, borrowing heavily from other modern "horror" films. To be honest, this doesn't strike me as a vampire film at all, but more like a movie about zombies. The vampires in this film don't have an ounce of elegance or charm about them, as vampires should. They are merely a bunch of ugly punks who roam about slashing people. This film had the possibility of being quite eerie, considering the setting and the premise of living in darkness for thirty days; unfortunately, the film was dumbed-down for the general public, and all the creepiness you'd expect is nothing but old-fashioned "porn-violence," a new term for horror films that are nothing but mindless violence and not much else.
DAVID SLADE, OPUS 2 July 26, 2008
wdanthemanw (Geneva, Switzerland)
**1/2 2007. Directed by David Slade. Alaska. A group of vampires besieges the survivors of a small town lost in snow and in the night. I had a strange feeling during the projection because I had the lingering impression to watch John Carpenter's The Thing (Collector's Edition), Vampires and Ghosts of Mars (Special Edition) brought together in one piece. So apart for the unusual white, black and blue Arctic setting of the film, you can skip this one. If you're a curious movie lover, you have already seen this film one way or another in your life. Already forgotten.
 Skip it ... July 22, 2008
Ron Sullivan (Philadelphia, PA United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Before I saw '30 Days ...' I was really excited for it when I learned that it was going to be directed by David Slade. I'd previously seen the film 'Hard Candy' (with a stellar Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson) and was looking forward to seeing what an intelligent director such as himself would do with a vampire movie. I always thought it was encouraging to see film-makers try and branch out and do something different.
At its core, the general concept for the film is also one that I found interesting. Basically a brood of vampires descend on a northern Alaskan where, in the winter, night lasts a month. There hasn't been a really good vampire film in awhile and I thought '30 Days ...' had the set-up to be pretty good.
I was horribly disappointed that the film fails on almost every level.
For all the talent that's involved here, I was surprised that this was such a "stupid" film. Unfortunately, that disappointment extends even down to the concept, which I was originally so excited about. In hindsight, given the thick of this information age we live in (where telecommunications, cell phones, email, text messages, etc dominate our lives) I could never really buy into the idea that this town was just completely cut off from the outside world. Looking back, if it were up to me (and it's not) I'd have made the suggestion that this would work better as a period piece. Setting everything in the 1800's or even the early 1900's, for example, would make it easier to buy into the idea that the town was completely isolated for the winter.
The script is a total disaster from front to back. In my opinion, more then anything else, for the concept that was laid out to be successful, '30 Days ...' had to accomplish just three tasks.
1. Especially in light of the title, you absolutely HAD TO SEE a believable passage of one month's time.
2. You had to be able to get to know the characters that were trapped and left as survivors.
3. To later appreciate the cat-and-mouse game being played between the vampires and the towns-people, you HAD to have a general idea of how the town was laid out.
That lack of an understanding of the geography of the town is frustrating because we never seen to have any clear idea of how difficult it would be to get from one point to another. When the survivors are talking about changing locations, are they talking about a point that's right next door, or completely across town? I would have fixed this with a single-shot pan with the camera (a la the classic opening of 'Touch of Evil') in the beginning of the film to let the viewer know what's where. Maybe pass over the town in a helicopter in the opening ...
Worse though, is the complete lack of any sense of time. This would be a difficult hurdle to jump over for this film, since there isn't any rising or setting of the sun. Everything in the movie feels like it was taking place over a couple of hours though, not days. For example, there never seems to be a concern over supplies or food, there's surprisingly little tension in the group, and outside of a half-arsed looking beard here or there, nobody looks as if they hadn't shaved, showered or changed their clothes. Without a genuine sense of the passage of time, it takes a mountain of the tension and sense of dread off the situation these characters are facing.
Speaking of characters, outside of Melissa George and Josh Hartnett, there's virtually zero character development here at all. I can tell you, with absolute honesty, that (not including the above) I can't recall the name of one person that lived in Barrow. This again, takes any of the emotional impact off a scene such as the vampire siege. If we don't know who the characters are that are being killed, how much do we really care?
Although they're certainly not done any favors with the script, the performances here are all bland at best and awful at worst. The only exception, for me, was the Renfield-like harbinger that comes to the town. Even his character doesn't make any sense though. If your film's vampires are going to be portrayed as a feral group of animals, that's fine. But why then, would anyone aspire to join them? These aren't the romantic Bram Stoker-type vamps, these are what amounts to a pack of wild dogs.
I'm sorry to say that nobody decided to rise to the occasion on this one. Although it's well-shot (the Blu-Ray version looks amazing), the whole film's a complete mess. It gets my lowest possible recommendation.
|
|
|
Copyright 2008 DVDonsale.com | |
