Review of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days (2010) by Jesse O — 10 Dec 2010

I'm not really surprised this movie was as dull and bad as it was. It's a low-budget sequel to a semi-successful horror movie. So of course it's gonna be a direct to dvd feature since it's a sequel that nobody really wanted in the first place.

Seeing as these movies are relatively low-cost and they usually end up making their money back pretty easily, so while this movie doesn't really break any new ground and while it's a bad movie, it's not really an offensively bad movie by any means.

Personally I enjoyed the first 30 Days of Night. What I enjoyed most about it was the locale and the visual style. Seeing that there's no sun for 30 days and the fact that it's set in Alaska, it had a very distinct and unique visual style.

And style really went a long way in the first movie because I was not a fan of the movie's pacing at all. And the fact that these were the first vampires I'd seen in forever that were actually sort of scary looking.

In this movie, they're just throwaway villains. They're more like zombies than they are vampires, so that means that there's no real sense of tension as there was in the first movie. But for a low-budget movie, at first glance, this movie didn't look bad at all.

What I mean by that is visually, it didn't look interesting or anything, but it had an average look about it. Which is more than I can say for certain low budget direct to dvd sequels (LOST BOYS 2 *COUGHS*).

Of course I said at first, because it all went to shit from there. The last couple of minutes of the movie look SOOO bad because you can tell that they're on a set and not a real ship that it just looked like those hokey movies you'd see on the Sci Fi (now known as Sy Fy for some moronic reason) channel.

And if they WERE on a real ship, then they found one shitty looking ship. The ending is also stupid, but then again what horror movie DOESN'T have a stupid ending these days. Um let's see...the characters are uninteresting, but this movie is not really about characters so it doesn't make sense to dock points away from this movie because of it.

The acting WOULD have been barely below average with a better script, but it's just crap. I mean it's just another bad horror movie sequel in a long line of bad horror movie sequels, so take it or leave it.

If you really want to watch this movie then...well then I don't know what the fuck your problem is but you need help and pronto.