I love vampires. I love comics. I love films. So imagine, if you possibly can, the sheer scale of my excitement when I found the film ’30 days of night’.It had it all – asinine, aesthetically pleasing leads which lent the whole gory thing an air of flawlessness, as though the actors had been picked from the rejects of a Gillette commercial. This is no bad thing, as none of us want to see some boss-eyed harridan looming into the lens like a seahag at a porthole.
Blood guts and gore splattered hither and thither to such a degree that at one point it felt as though both of my eyes had ruptured and I was staring at the world through an oozing, scarlet screen.
Night vision – as the title suggests, most of the film is rendered in near darkness and shot on what appeared to be cutting-edge-o-matic cameras, the sort of MTV friendly cinema scope which, to my aged eyes was so bloody modern I nearly recoiled in fear. It’s all very well when music promos make me feel as though the future is accelerating into the distance without me but when films do it it makes me want to doctor my birth certificate by about ten years.
That aside, the film was going well, I’d settled into my friend’s ridiculously comfortable leather sofa, opened a can and kicked off my shoes. It was a shame then that they choose to cast a clone of Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys as the head vampire, Marlow. Much to my chagrin I found I kept hearing bursts of ‘West End Girls’ every time he swaggered, swathed or slithered onto the screen. It got to the point where I couldn’t look for laughing.
This got me thinking about other roles in films which could, and should, be remade with woefully mis-cast leads. The best we came up with was This is England with little Jimmy Krankie as Shaun, or Schindlers List with Kris Marshall as Oskar Schindler. If anyone can come up with any better ones let me know, I’m intrigued.
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