30 Days of Night; The Darjeeling Limited

30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007) - B-

Slade knows from scary, and gets off to a dynamite start -- it helps that Barrow, AK is a killer setting, becoming sort of supernatural in its own right as we see 2/3 of its population catch the last plane out before the sun can drop below the horizon, not to be seen again for a month. The frigid melancholy of the first twenty minutes, as Hartnett's Sheriff Oleson makes the rounds in preparation for the annual shut-down, got under my skin a hundred times more than the armies of vicious blood-sucking creatures Slade busts out shortly thereafter. But at first that too seems promising -- Slade has a knack for recognizing unsettling imagery, an understanding of why a momentary glimpse of something in a corner of the frame can be much scarier than a full view, and a sense of what it is about vampires that makes them so enduringly frightening. A third of the way through, I was genuinely excited. Then the movie becomes a pretty generic piece of survival horror, without any characters that really connect, and I started to get bored. On the whole 30 Days of Night is still kind of awesome -- I love the fact that Danny Huston plays the lead villain, Josh Hartnett is effortlessly believable as the Barrow sheriff, the movie is imposingly gory, and the first act portended the best movie of the year -- but it can't sustain momentum, and at 113 minutes, that stings.

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007) - C

Bite me.