For a brood of desperate, ever-thirsting blood mongers, the ravenous vampire clan of “30 Days of Night” sure lets an awful lot of the precious juice go to waste. Laying siege to a tiny northern Alaskan compound, isolated by 80 miles of frozen, impassable roads and month-long sunless arctic winters, they make quite a scene of thrashing their prey about with wild abandon after gnashing gooey hunks from their throats, squandering what should have been their delicious hot liquid lunch to just gout out into the snow. As bewildering as this profound lack of respect for resource would seem, it may offer a critical insight into the filmmakers’ attitudes.

Sophomore director David Slade’s history lies mostly in music videos, and his first feature, the sly and subversive thriller “Hard Candy,” won a notable degree of critical acclaim. He has proven himself to have a great eye as a shooter, and won the gig of interpreting “30 Days of Night,”—a breakout comic book hit (that really put the “graphic” in “graphic novel”)—through Sam Raimi’s meat-grinding Ghost House Productions. Raimi, director of the “Spider-Man” and “Evil Dead” trilogies, is certainly no stranger to splatterfest horror or comic book adaptations. As owner of the company, he presumably has dibs to direct any property that comes across his desk. Or, he can decide simply to slap his name on as producer and let an underling do the heavy lifting. It could be deduced, then, that just about anything from Ghost House that isn’t directed by the big guy himself would be, by his own judgment, neither engaging nor original enough to bother with. Raimi, like his new vampires, is demonstrably prepared to toy with a hopeful premise, suck its life out and leave it fallow in the cold.

Marketed as having “rewritten” the vampire mythos, Slade’s work here does effectively strip all the glamour from the genre. Sticking a hoary, un-manicured middle finger up to the effete fashion-queen fops (we’re looking at you, Ann Rice) that traditionally prowl these alleyways, the blood-suckers here appear as a nightmarish amalgam of cable TV’s favorite predators. With soulless black shark eyes and pointy little piranha teeth, they move in packs like wolves, darting through shadows and across rooftops, shrieking like hawkmen and pouncing the innocent like velociraptors. When not engaged in gleefully voracious gore-fits, however, they tend to just hang about like slackjawed yokels, coughing at each other and drooling oozy blood beards that never seem to dry.

Their alpha male (Danny Huston - brother of Angelica and son to the late, great John Huston) stalks pensively around like an insurance salesman, croaking orders in a guttural, Klingon-esque throat-speak, presenting every bit like a “Glengarry Glen Ross” extra who’s crashed his car and swallowed a cockroach. While ignoring all other convention of personal hygiene, he wears a nice, if stained, white button down shirt, and sports a spiffily squared away whitewall haircut. Although occasionally able to impose his slimy authority on his punky subordinates, he doesn’t seem a terribly effective leader.

His master plan to seize a town whose month-long darkness would afford them a four-week smorgasbord probably sounded like a stroke of genius to his pack of barking morons. The decadence of eating 100 people in one sitting would probably be a pretty tantalizing prospect for a famished vampire. But, the leader’s foresight doesn’t extend quite as far as day two, when the buffet is over and the cupboard’s already gone bare, leaving his hungry minions to crawl around for the remainder of the long and cold sleepless month, hoping a survivor or two might peek out from hiding to use a bathroom or try a run for the store.

Their striking inability to pace themselves might serve as another mirror to the pitiable level of craftsmanship at work here. The “30 Days” of advertised action could just as easily have been edited into a taut and suspensful single night fight. For a director with such an accomplished track record in music videos, Slade shows a troubling lack of rhythm. As the few remaining human morsels annefrank it in various attics around town, the story jumps abruptly forward by weeks at a shot, and considering the tiresome, two-dimensional human characters involved, this might actually be seen as a favor.
Lead by their pretty-boy goody-goody sheriff (Josh Hartnett), the small group of refugees huddle around looking blandly at each other like cardboard cutouts, with little apparent concern for lack of food and water, or any discernable conflict or evolution of relationship between them as the month draws on. Dragging through these scenes, one begins to hope that, in waning supply, perhaps they might start eating each other. If only.

Ignoring that the vampires never seem to notice or investigate the houses that have, say, heat and lights, or that they would seem to have only one device for luring the hidden out into the open (which, to their credit, does work pretty well), or that, in an environment described as “10-below-zero,” some of the townsfolk manage to sustain themselves for days on end buried in snow underneath houses—when the gore hits, it hits in big greasy chumbuckets. From a movie like this, a certain degree of head-exploding and limb-tearing is to be expected, afterall. At least in this respect, “30 Days” succeeds. The blood stains in the snow from the opening attack are evidently severe enough that even whiteout conditions and constant snowfall don’t manage to cover them over through the course of the month. And, either the sheriff needs to sharpen his axe or just learn that it takes three solid whacks to knock a vampire melon off its stump.

If mindless blood-feasts are your thing, this one may be worth a chew, but if the “Nosferatu” on hand, or producer Sam Raimi, are to serve as any example, you should stand warned that you’ll probably just want to spit it out.