News

Late to the Party – 30 Days of Night

Published

6 years ago

February 21, 2018

Vampires have never been my preference. Sure, I enjoyed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the first From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, and Blade, but I’ve never been lost in the mystique of the vampire as some people have.

That’s why it took me so long to watch 30 Days of Night.

Vampires, themselves, run the range from animals only looking to sate their hunger to lonely, sophisticated immortals who are to be pitied as much as feared. 30 Days of Night is about the former type more than the latter, but not as much as I was initially led to believe.

Spoilers below this point!!

The movie starts in a remote Alaskan town, on the last day of sunlight. This alone is an incredible idea I can’t believe nobody has thought of before.

It makes perfect sense that such a dedicated nocturnal predator would thrive in a part of the world where the sun literally disappears for a month or more at a time. A stranger wanders in and sets the stage for the invasion, destroying satellite phones and killing sled dogs.

The stranger is caught stirring things up at the local bar by the sheriff, Ebon Oleson, played by Josh Hartnett (The Faculty, Pearl Harbor), where he gives them a chilling warning. “They’re coming.”

In the first attack on the edge of town, the radio tower is destroyed. Then the blood begins to flow in earnest as people are dragged screaming from their homes and torn apart, one after another.

As the sheriff and his estranged wife piece things together, they grab a small group of survivors and hole up in a dark, hidden attic. We also meet the vampire’s leader, played by Danny Huston (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Wonder Woman), and we see these aren’t simply animal-type vampires, although they only talk to each other in guttural grunts and screams.

30 Days of Night

Then we jump to seven days later.

Yeah. I didn’t really expect them to show all 30 days on screen, but it wasn’t something I thought about until those words flashed across the screen, either.

The vampires have already all but killed the rest of the town, save for a few stragglers they push out into the street as bait for other survivors. A few more deaths, and the remaining people move from the attic to the grocery store, under the cover of swirling snow.

Day 18.

The remaining survivors make a run to the police station while Ebon creates a diversion. It works and he rejoins the others.

So the movie goes until the end, bouncing from hiding place to hiding place. Occasionally losing another human or killing a vampire. Until the final climactic battle.

With the town burning and the survivors down to Ebon, his ex, his little brother, and a few others, the hero makes the dramatic self-sacrifice of injecting himself with vampire blood to gain their strength while he goes out and challenges their leader in bloody hand-to-hand combat. He wins, and he and his ex watch the sun rise on the 31st day, where he crumbles to ash in her arms.

30 Days of Night

As far as vicious, monstrous vampires go, this is a pretty damn good movie. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, and it has a fair few of the vampiric cliches to it, but those are more personal issues.

All the actors do well in their respective roles and the cinematography is excellent, even if nothing really stands out.

That’s really my biggest problem with the movie. I remember it getting a lot of hype when it was first released, and there’s really nothing about it that stands out.

30 Days of Night isn’t a bad movie by any means, but don’t expect to be sleeping with the lights on. Just grab some popcorn and sit back for a fun ride, and you’ll be good to go.

Check back next week when iHorror author Kelly McNeely checks out the movie Prom Night!

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

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Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.