30 Days of Night: Dark Days (2010)

SO THIS IS THE SEQUEL?I don't know where to start. It wasn't that great. The ending of the movie epitomized the deplorable script writing. Stella is attempting to tell the world about vampires while the government is trying to cover it up. The local FBI man is in cahoots with the vampires as he desires to be one. A group of vampire hunters meets Stella in her room and asks her to join them (along with a turncoat vampire) to go into the underground tunnels of L.A. and hunt down and kill Lilith, the vampire queen. Lilith speaks a strange tongue with subscripts, until the very end when she can suddenly speak English. The acting wasn't all that great. This is another movie which uses the high tech "special effect" of jerking the camera around to make us feel the terror of the scene (yawn!) because the script can't do it.Lilith, in ancient folklore, fed off the blood on infants. They seemed to have messed that up too. If you watched the first one, go ahead and get disappointed on this one.

It's almost a year after Barrow, Alaska was decimated. The town has gone back to normal. Stella Oleson (Kiele Sanchez) is trying to convince a disbelieving world that vampires exist. In L.A., Paul (Rhys Coiro), Amber (Diora Baird) and Todd (Harold Perrineau) are vampire hunters who introduces her to their vampire ally Dane and their mission to kill the vampire queen Lilith (Mia Kirshner).After such a great start with the original, this is a rather disappointing sequel. I get a sense that this wants to expand this universe and Stella keeps mentioning a war in the opening narration. However, this franchise takes one giant step back into the crowded countless run-of-the-mill straight-to-DVD vampire B-movies.It's always problematic that nobody believes. In this world, the vampires have attacked all around the country. It doesn't look like there's a vast conspiracy. The vampires aren't running the country. Even with the craziest ideas, there are people willing to believe but apparently nobody believes Stella even when they witness vampires getting smoked. I don't get how the Alaskan town could go back to normal and the massacre being explained away. I don't get how this is not big news. I don't get why this is not going viral.There is also the lack of tension. The original is such a compelling horror. The vampires got frightening again. This movie pales in comparison. Maybe my expectations were too high. There is no longer any point in continuing the franchise along this line. It's such a short time since the original but a reboot is probably the only way to go next.

I suppose one could do worse than make a sequel to 30 Days of Night. Heroic female as the lead here and a female head vampire...girl power is the theme running through this film as far as the leads go. It's not even in the same realm as 30 Days Of Night the original so no comparison there. I gave it a 5 for a courageous effort and at least it made an attempt though it failed in most cases undeniably. The actors, outside of Sanchez and Coiro, were stale cardboard cutouts at best. The film takes too long to get going and once it finally does it seemingly goes nowhere fast. There's a few dim highlights laced throughout but nothing remotely like the original. Okay for a rent if you're not expecting too much.

30 Days of Night was a fun action-horror film with literary value. The inferior sequel attempts to be just fun action-horror, in the spirit of Blade, and fails even at that.Reminiscent of The Hills Have Eyes 2 (sequel to the remake) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series), this insipid snore fest had me guffawing every couple of minutes. I haven't rooted for the deaths of dumb characters like this since the kids in Jurassic Park.Where the first film surprised at every turn, the sequel seems to setup clever reversals but never follows through--the writers seem to take their dumb first idea every time, totally predictable and implausible.Apart from the most unromantic, awkward, borderline-inappropriate love scene I can recall, there were no highlights worth mentioning. Avoid this tripe at all cost.