"30 Days of Night" | This bitefest is a real frightfest

Do you know what vampires call an isolated Alaskan town that goes dark for a whole month?

A buffet.

That's the clever premise for the film based on IDW's hit horror comic book by writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith. Fleshing out their minimalist story in a way that won't cause the blood to drain from fans' faces, it's one of the better recent efforts as both a comic adaptation and a fright flick.

The residents who haven't flown out of Barrow before its annual month of darkness sets in begin to notice something: They're being cut off from the outside world. Phones, Internet, helicopter — all sabotaged at the same time a scraggly nut with bad teeth appears (Ben Foster, the psychopath from "3:10 to Yuma").

After looking into an increasingly disturbing and bloody series of incidents, the bitter sheriff (Josh Hartnett) and his ex (Melissa George) find themselves leading a small group trying to survive the month of carnage. They hide, dive into crawl spaces, repurpose a marijuana grow light and sometimes sacrifice themselves, as a gang of foreign-speaking vampires literally tears through the helpless town.

One of the black-eyed, razor-toothed bloodsuckers wonders why they didn't think of this before.

Director David Slade showed he could create palpable tension with 2005's talky pedophile drama, "Hard Candy," and he goes for it here. Along with a number of solid scares and liberal gore, there's one ambitious shot when hell breaks loose that's worth the whole outing: from overhead along Barrow's snowy, blood-stained main street, as the vampires rip and toss humans like paper dolls and some futilely run or fight back with guns. Also, this is the closest I've seen Hartnett come to acting. He was so wooden in "The Black Dahlia" that he could have plunged himself through a vampire's heart.

The one major weak spot is the monsters themselves. Not only do they fail to reproduce the creepiness of Temple-

smith's depictions, but they're kind of silly, with cheap-looking makeup that breaks what's otherwise a consistent vibe. They walk around hissing as if they were bitten by Gloria Swanson circa "Sunset Boulevard," and they never wipe their mouths for the whole month. Which is just rude.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com