The premise of this modern day vampire story, which involves a band of bloodsuckers descending on an Alaskan town that suffers a month of every year without sun, is undeniably clever.

With no ultraviolet to send them back to their coffins, vampires can run amok 24/7, which ought to make for some very bloody celluloid.

And it does; there are lots of thrills and at least as much bloodletting as you'd expect from such a film.

However, it suffers from an uncomfortably quick pacing that fails to make the audience feel the length of those 30 days of darkness.

In fact, don't be surprised if, by the end of this two-hour film, you come away feeling as though the events took place over a single, surprisingly short evening.

Perhaps the problem is simply that it's difficult to show the passage of dozens of days without any sunrises or sunsets to help. Or maybe it's just because, instead of focusing on the inevitable -- and, one would assume, fascinating -- psychological effects of quietly cowering from a town full of vampires in secret attics for weeks on end, the filmmakers opted to concentrate on filling the film with chases and fights.

Whatever the reason, the movie suffers for it, though not to such an extent that vampire fans should be steered away.

The special features on both the DVD and Blu-ray editions are both minimal and nearly identical, consisting of an audio commentary provided by stars Josh Hartnett and Melissa George and producer Robert Tapert, and a lengthy and surprisingly engaging making-of documentary.

There is also a highly watchable vignette from an anime show called Blood +, a Japanese TV series about an unusual breed of vampires.