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The basic plot: Barrow, Alaska is America's northernmost town. As such, it endures one month of solid darkness every year. Many residents choose to leave town rather than put up with it and those who stay are a weird, motley bunch. Among them are the town sheriff, his younger brother, their grandmother, a deputy and various families. Oh, and the sheriff's estranged wife who misses her plane out and is stuck in Barrow for a month.

This year, the town's got a problem: Vampires from...yeah...that's not really very clear...have decided to descend on the town for 30 Days of Feasting while the sun can't harm them. They've decided to kill everyone in town and destroy the place because...yeah...that's not really very clear, either.

In fact, they seem a little paranoid that humans are going to realize that they're not just mythical horror movie creatures, so messily eating an entire Alaskan town seems like not the brightest of ideas. A rag-tag group of survivors has to try to survive after the initial attack, trying to stay alive for thirty days until the sun comes up.

Let me say this: I was more impressed by Josh Hartnett than I expected to be. He's been in some films I really liked over the last few years (The Black Dahlia, Lucky Number Slevin), but for this one he really uglied it up and got gritty. For that I applaud him.

Also: The vampires in this flick are more or less the way I prefer them -- crazy, bloodthirsty, animal monsters who seem more beast than human. Anne Rice Vampires in silk and velvet, with chalices and aching souls, drive me nuts. The Vampires from Blade, with their various clans and secret languages, are about as far as I'm willing to go into Vampire sophistication -- and even they're pushing it. I think monsters are far scarier when they're...you know...MONSTERS.

These vamps fit that bill -- not too smart, not too sophisticated, even if they do speak some strange Romanian-esque language only other vampires can understand and occasionally rhapsodize a bit incomprehensibly about what filth humans are and how much they enjoy killing them.

But here's where it falls apart for me: I don't think it's possible to understand, from the film itself, what these vampires were after. They talk about the great achievement of hiding their existence from humans, they talk about wanting to preserve that secrecy -- and yet they slaughter an entire town and try to messily cover this up by making it look like an accident. To what end? They've clearly been living somewhere, doing something, for hundreds of years. They can't be that hungry. There's some suggestion that maybe this is the beginning of a Vampire invasion -- they're going to start at the top and work their way down Alaska, killing people off town by town. But again -- to what end? Isn't that sort of tipping their hand to the humans, as you don't have to go very far in Alaska, even at that time of year, before you're dealing with regular days and nights? Because only one, head vampire does any real talking in the film, we don't learn a whole lot about their motivation beyond liking to drink blood (and spilling more of it than they get into their gaping, fanged mouths).

But if you ignore that bit of it (and there's some ridiculous plotting hole in even great horror movies), it's a pretty gory, scary good time for people who like their vampires feral, their townspeople edible and their nerves good and jangled just before Halloween.

Anybody else see it yet? What did you think?