30 Jours de nuit 2 : Jours sombres

Unlike the original, which relied on a tense, cunning, isolated, claustrophobic atmosphere which threw me back to that feeling of hopelessness conveyed in John Carpenter's The Thing, this shoot 'em up sequel focuses more on strobe lighting, gun play, and pop out scares to convey it's tone. The acting is on par with a STV sequel, but I won't even begin to touch upon the scripts many weaknesses. The many shaky cam shots running down dark corridors could have been lifted out of The Blair Witch Project. The trigger happy heroine in this sequel could have been lifted straight from the Resident Evil franchise. All-in-all not a bad vampire movie on it's own, but not a great one either. Worth a rent in the genre for you could do much worse, but if you are a fan of the original and expecting more of the same ... well, drop all expectations and wipe your brain blank once you press play.

this sequel follows an original that featured a decent budget and some very good actors.

and this, the first sequel, follows the pattern of most. that is as you move farther from the original, the budget shrinks.

and the consequences are: less sets, less location shoots, less action, no helicopter or overhead shots, cheaper actors, cheaper scripts and cheaper directors.

now some directors can take less money and turn out comparable or even better efforts than the original--but these are few and far between.

and this movie definitely suffers from sequelitis.

the whole thing feels stretched.

I can see the next movie in the trilogy, 100,000 screaming and furious people chasing down the director and producer of this turd to get their money back.

More seriously, as a fan of the first film, I was as disappointed as I've ever been by any movie after watching this. During the first film, I actually felt emotion while watching. I felt the sudden jolts of shock and fear of course, but I felt more than that. I felt the hopelessness and despair of the characters trapped in their terrible and inescapable nightmare. I actually FELT their desperation. It was fantastic. As far as I'm concerned the original 30 Days of Night is the only vampire HORROR film ever made.

This Dark Days is a Frankenstein creation of hacked up and reassembled modern day vampire movies (that weren't very good in the first place) This could as easily be Blade 5 or Underworld 4 or Vampires 3 , I was half waiting for everyone to start kung-fu fighting.

This was as much a horror as a pie in the face is comedy. I'm sorry. I wanted to like this, and there were so many possibilities to take this after the original, obviously whoever owned it just wanted to try and make some money by releasing something with the 30 Days of Night name attached to it. There is zero writing. The ending sucked. Not because it was predictable, it just sucked like the entire film. And yes another female character undergoes the Ripley / Sarah Connor transformation.

Does anyone ever have an original thought? To all writers, I'm over it. Pick a new theme for every single sequel. Get a new formula, whatever. It's done - like a Thanksgiving turkey. OK? In short the original blew me away, and this just blew. Hope this saves you some money. Jackie

So I wasn't what you would call, a huge fan for the first 30 Days of Night movie. I hadn't read the graphic novel, but I heard the movie was a fairly accurate adaptation of it. I did enjoy it, but I felt the pacing was slow, the characters weren't very well acted or flushed out, and really for a movie...devoid of any extensive plot. It was a slow, but occasionally fun watch.

Dark Days, the straight to DVD sequel of 30DON, delivers a lot of the same, only with a smaller budget. The basic plot is as follows: Stella Oleson, one of the few survivors of the first movie (albeit played by a different actress), is out for revenge on all vampires for the death of her beloved husband Eben. She makes her way to a major city, where she holds what are essentially vampire awareness seminars as a way to draw out the occasional one or two inquisitive vampires. This catches the attention of a small pod of vampire hunters, who contact her for their crusade against the uber vampire...Lilith.

The plot really isn't too shabby, but feels very under worked in this film. The lead females' (except for Lilith who has maybe a total of 5-7 minutes screen time) have a pretty believable performance, the lead males are...eh...well they're there at least.

The special effects for a straight to DVD are actually really well done in this film, it's somewhere in between expensive made for TV movies and terrible Hollywood films that should never have made it to the big screen. Cgi isn't hokey, make-up design for the most part is pretty well done. Although the teeth prosthetic look well...well they're kind of like those fake vampire teeth you pick up in the 99c bin during Holloween. Some of the gruesome death scenes and graphic gore is done quite nicely though.

The reason I didn't really care for this movie is the pacing is just terrible. The plot doesn't have enough material to fill up an entire movie, so we get these long dull sequences that just feel like filler. The action isn't too bad, but all of it is filmed in darkness illuminated by flickering lights. The scenery is almost entirely a warehouse district, and tunnel scenes...which can easily BE shot in a warehouse, so your eyes will get bored with the sets. This combined with the sub-par acting by many individuals in this film...just made this film so very...meh.

Basically it was interesting enough that I was able to sit and finish watching it, but it's a completely forgettable film for anyone who's not a die-hard 30 DON fan. It's a fairly bland vampire action flick, personally if I were to watch it with company I'm fairly certain everyone would be too bored to finish it.

A perfect case in which we see that the only thing that has similarity in terms of quality between both films is the title.

A really must no see vampires movie.