THE GOOD: production design; building dread in the first half of the movie; Ben Foster; creepy girl vampire; overhead “eye in the sky” shot of vampire attacks
THE BAD: the vampires’ convenient disappearances at key times; disappearance of tension and dread from the first half; deputy’s reaction with his family to the hopelessness of the situation…ick!
THE WONKY: Danny Huston; muffin monster; melted cell phone pile
This is a solid vampire movie that does a number of things well, but kind of lets some of that go, adds some goofy stuff and logic mis-steps to take away from some of the good stuff that it has going for it. I knew what to expect, at least story wise, because of having read the graphic novel…and over all I think that the movie did a nice job.
The introduction of setting and the characters is done well here…not much is over explained as you infer characters and relationships from many different cues. There are plenty of stock characters, but they are vampire food primarily, so what do you expect? The layout of the town is shown, and you get a feeling for the isolation of the town. And slowly, things start happening which are at first odd, then weird, then creepy, then foreboding…a really nice job of tension building here…by the time the shit hits the fan you are really on edge…and Ben Foster is really creepy in the “Renfield” role.
The vampires are beasts…as a friend said, it’s nice to see vampire’s that aren’t mopey and goth. They are truly creepy…feral and seemingly unstoppable. However, I wasn’t into their weird language with subtitles (many of which were nonsense and silly) and for as much as they were bad ass, they seemed to pick and choose times when they had to be full force attack or slow, around or conveniently somewhere else. They had great scenes of them “playing with” their food like a pack, but then were suddenly kind of just standing around staring at people.
Their initial attacks were very effective, and I wanted to see more of them going after people, or toying with them, instead of just playing a record with a nail to…be cool AFTER they had just eaten people??
I’m not a big Danny Huston fan over all. Something about him just kind of annoys me…Constant Gardner, The Proposition, Children of Men…he just sort of grates on me. He had the look here, but I couldn’t get into him as this unstoppable monster leader of the vampires…something was missing…not sure exactly what.
Some of the pacing and weird logic leaps in the second half did in what was a pretty effective first half…David Slade directed with a sure hand, with the same look and intensity that he had with Hard Candy…though some of the fast edits were a bit much, and the ripping of the throats was a bit lame. Visual style…very nice…including the great overhead attack shot…overall this was a solid vampire movie.
7 out of 10
Filed under: 2007, March 2008, Rating - 7
