ScreenWize

Paying homage to the classic horror film Night of the Living Dead, director David Slade (working from a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith) locates the threat of invading evil in the small Alaskan town of Barrow in deepest winter when the sun goes down for a whole month. It’s a clever idea indeed (one of the vampires wryly comments: “we should have come here before”) but the film never manages to rise from the standard horror game of last man standing.

Slade does a nice job building up the tension as the town starts to shut down for the long winter season and most of the town’s residents leave. Left behind is Sheriff Oleson (Josh Hartnett), his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) - who misses the last flight out - and a collection of locals required to keep the town on minimum function while the snows falls. Then the menace arrives, first in the form of failing electricity and phone services, and then as black shapes that leap and tumble out of the darkness, swiftly taking their human prey. Blood is sucked, heads are left on poles, and within moments the town is savagely reduced to a few surviving people holed up in an attic.

Hartnett and George are rather limp as the forces of goodness, slowly working out how to deal with the lethal and unstoppable force surrounding the steadily dwindling group of residents, whilst also working through their marriage problems (”is now a good time to have children, dear?”). The bad guys – and gals - are far more interesting, and Danny Huston as their leader Marlow and Ben Foster as The Stranger who brings the pack to town are compellingly gruesome. The vampires have shed their gothic origins (except they speak in an unknown and subtitled language) and have morphed to become deadly zombie-vampire-werewolves, relentless bloodsucking creatures with pointy teeth who howl and shriek, occasionally offering a word of poetic wisdom.

The scenes of carnage are frequently impressionistic and out of focus, but never as dull as the dialogue which – like the vampires – really sucks. Despite this, the combination of snow, darkness and blood create a stylish look for a night of fear and horror.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon