Review by Justin Bateman
Stars Kiele Sanchez, Rhys Coiro, Diora Baird, Harold Perrineau, Mia Kirshner | Written by Ben Ketai and Steve Niles
UK certification 18 | UK RRP £22.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 92 minutes | Directed by Ben Ketai
At the end of 30 Days of Night, Stella (Melissa George) held her estranged husband and by then vampire Eben (Josh Hartnett) in her arms as the sun came up on a winter of death and destruction in Barrow, Alaska. With those first shards of light, he burnt to an ashy shadow of his former self, leaving her alone.
Dark Days picks up the story one year later at which point Stella (now played by Kiele Sanchez) is trying and generally failing to convince people that vampires exist. However, thanks to her one-woman PR campaign she is eventually found in Los Angeles by a group of self-proclaimed vampire hunters who have suffered a similar fate to Stella and want to wreak revenge on the bloodthirsty heliophobes.
Like the original, this is based on the comic book mini-series by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. While the first story had the terrific premise of a month of darkness to help the pointy-toothed creatures, this follow-up suffers rather from being just another vampire movie. The writers have at least mixed things up by changing the dynamics of the action - the hunted become the hunters - but despite this and the fact that the good guys have help from a semi-vampire, it still doesn't really work.
Part of the issue is that if anything, the hunters now have almost too many advantages - they know where head vampire Lilith (Kirshner) is based and there's always the chance that they can, ahem, shed some light on the matter. They also know exactly when they're likely to encounter the enemy, resulting in a distinct lack of tension, which for a horror film is something of a problem.
The performances are perfectly fine, the script isn't bad and there's a reasonable helping of blood and gore but there's also an over-reliance on guns as the weapon of choice and not really enough invention in the deaths until the very end, which is part of the fun of this kind of film. So while it's by no means a disaster, neither does it anything like live up to the originality of 30 Days of Night.
EXTRAS ★★★ A decent collection of bonus features with a commentary from director Ben Ketai, a behind the scenes featurette, 'The Gritty Realism of Dark Days' which includes interviews with cast and crew, and 'Graphic Inspirations: Comic to Film Exploration', a look at how Ketai adapted the comic book.