MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

An angry, vicious beast of a horror film, 30 Days of Night is a vampire movie with a difference. Based on the popular graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, and directed by David Slade, the film stars Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Mark Boone Junior as inhabitants of a small Alaskan fishing town who, each year, must endure ‘thirty days of night’ when the sun dips below the Arctic horizon and doesn’t re-appear for a month. Usually, life goes on as normal – but during this particular period of perpetual twilight, things go horribly wrong when the town is attacked by a gang of shrieking, brutal vampires led by the mysterious Stranger (Ben Foster) and the ghastly Marlow (Danny Huston), who seem intent on turning a once-peaceful community into a blood-soaked human buffet with an orgy of death and violence.

The music for 30 Days of Night is by composer Brian Reitzell, who is best known to date for collaborating with Irish rocker Kevin Shields on Lost in Translation in 2003, and scoring the oddball Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction in 2006. I have to say that, all in all, I completely and utterly detested what he did on 30 Days of Night; it represents everything I hate about certain kinds of modern film music – themeless, aimless, pointless ‘sound design’ scoring which is barely indistinguishable from the audio FX track in the mix, and which adds no discernible level of drama or nuance to the film it accompanies.

30 Days of Night groans and scrapes and drones and thumps for 47 minutes, and then simply ends. There’s no tangible musical element to latch on to, and no real indication of what may or may not be happening on screen at any given moment. Most of the time, it’s boring and incoherent, and when it’s not – in tracks like the fast-paced “Muffin Muncher” – it becomes obnoxious and irritating.

Like Lucky You, Varese Sarabande were originally intending to release this score in regular fashion – but for what ever reason, the release got cancelled and Reitzell’s work ended up as a download-only release on the delightfully named Ipecac Records. Although, thinking about it, that’s probably the best possible place for this abomination, because I felt sick at the end of it all…

Rating: ½

Track Listing:

• Prelude/Last Day of Sun (2:58)
• Girl Bait (3:38)
• Muffin Muncher (1:57)
• Soon There Will Be Just 5 (5:21)
• Vampires On the Horizon (1:20)
• They Didn’t Take Me (1:31)
• Barrow Burns (2:14)
• Ditchwitched (3:39)
• Vampired Johnny (3:14)
• Gus Loses His Head (1:31)
• You Wanna Play With Me Now? (2:59)
• The Bloody Fruits of Barrow (2:16)
• Eben Shoots Up (2:42)
• The One Who Fights (3:14)
• Daybreak (2:34)
• Overture (2:22)
• Underture (3:52)

Running Time: 47 minutes 22 seconds

Ipecac Recordings IPC98 (2007)