All I knew to expect from this film was nitty-gritty British realism. I didn’t even know what the story line was, but from the first scene I was gripped – and for much of the time, tense and upset. Director Paul Andrew Williams throws us headfirst into a chaotic and panicky scene in which prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) hides the petrified 12-year-old Joanne (Georgia Groome) in a public toilet somewhere in London, while she goes out to earn them some money so they can get out of the city. Despite sporting a fresh black-eye, Kelly manages to make some money at King’s Cross and returns with enough cash for them to take a train to Brighton.

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If there’s one genre that will never recover from the countless (inevitable) clichés then it would be the horror genre. You either go for cult, classic stuff or for cheap entertainment. Only a few titles hover somewhere in between and as far as I’m concerned that’s where the interesting stuff is. Judging by its rather tantalizing trailer, the prospects for 30 Days of Night by one David Slade – yes the man from Hard Candy – looked rather good. And in fact, the first half hour was very promising, yet Slade made the fundamental mistake (of the type I’d like to refer to as The Village-syndrome) of giving away too much of the scary vampires.
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As both a film buff and aspiring screenwriter, I have been watching the developments in the Hollywood strike talks, specifically the WGA/writer’s strike, which as of Monday, November 5th, is official. Hopefully it won’t be as long as the 1988 strike, which affected several TV shows and awards programs.
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