First impressions are important, and the first few seconds
of Fright Night sucked me in
instantly. It’s just a sampling of the score over a black frame, but the music
is an overblown, spooky throwback to creature features of the past, and it’s
mood setting awesome. From there we meet our characters and get introduced to
the brewing conflict. If you’ve seen the 1985 version of Fright Night, then not much of it will come as a surprise. If not,
here’s a small primer. Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is an ordinary teenage
kid. He lives with a single mother (Toni Collette), he’s got a girlfriend
(Imogen Poots) he’s trying to lose his virginity to, he’s got an obnoxious
dweeb of a friend named Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and he’s got a vampire
named Jerry (Colin Ferrell) who lives next door. The vampire is the problem.
He’s been killing people since he moved in and now he’s picked Charley and his
friends and family to be next. Being the man of the house, it’s up to Charley
to take the fight to Jerry before any harm can come to his loved ones. But how
is a kid supposed to take down a powerful vampire? Maybe famed mystic and Las
Vegas showman Peter Vincent (David Tennant) can help; if only he can put down
the bottle and stop being self obsessed long enough to remember everything he
knows about vampires.
The first impressions were good, but as the film went on I
began to have problems with how it was paced and structured. What we got
forewent a traditional three-act structure, and while that can sometimes be
interesting, here I feel like it made things suffer. Instead of a first act
where our main character engages in some Rear
Window inspired spying on his neighbors, which would have been in keeping
with the first Fright Night, we got a
really lengthy first act where our main characters are all introduced and then nothing
much happens. Instead of a tension building second act where Charley knows that
Jerry is a vampire but nobody else will believe him, pretty much as soon as
Charley knows that his neighbor is a fiend, Jerry comes over, blows up his
house, and the rest of the film is protracted action sequences. It was a
strange way to tell a story. The first half dragged and started to get boring,
then the second half was nearly exhausting. For this film to really be a
success there needed to be a more engaging cat and mouse game between Charley
and Jerry, there needed to be a building of tension while Jerry stalked
Charley’s loved ones like prey, or it at least needed to be funnier or something.
For a movie about a vampire moving to the suburbs, Fright Night isn’t very funny at all.
One of the things this movie did well is that it generally
improved on the largely lame performances of the original. The characters of
Charley, his mother Jane, and his girlfriend Amy are still completely
undeveloped and uninteresting, but here the actors playing them are all
capable. If you were forced to describe any of these people or what their
distinguishing character traits were, however, you’d be in quite a pickle. I
normally really like Anton Yelchin, he brings a good energy to the films he
does and he even has a smattering of unique charisma. He isn’t able to do much
with Charley Brewster, however. You like him, he seems fine, but the most that
can be said of Yelchin here is that he goes through the motions without
embarrassing himself. Amy was such a poorly written and performed character in
the original Fright Night that I
actively wanted her to get eaten, but she isn’t written as such a stereotypical,
nervous prude of a teen girlfriend here. And Imogen Poots, while not giving us
anything special, is at least believable delivering lines. Toni Collette plays
the mother and the less said about her character the better. She’s the classic horror
character that’s only there to make stupid decisions and get everybody else in
trouble.
In the first film Charley’s friend is an annoying idiot
named Evil Ed. Here his friend is just Ed, and he’s less of an annoyance and
more of a sad dork. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is so strongly identified as the
character McLovin that it almost seems ridiculous whenever he shows up in
anything other than Superbad; he does
pretty well as the sci-fi and fantasy obsessed geek that nobody else wants to
be around though. Ed and Charley used to be best friends and do all sorts of
dweeby things together, but then one day Charley started to get accepted by the
cool crowd and he left his old bud out to dry. In Mintz-Plasse’s hands Ed is
more of a pitiable figure than an annoyance; he brings the emotion. But later
on in the film when he’s asked to do some bigger, showier work, I stopped
buying him in the role. I’m sorry, but his lisp and squinty dork face just
don’t allow him to do anything other than be the sad outcast. Conversely, Poots
also gets a chance to let her hair down toward the end, and she rose to the
occasion considerably better. She doesn’t get much time to be interesting, but
she at least showed that she’s got the potential to shine if paired with better
material.
Much like in the original Fright Night, the best characters in the movie are also the
showiest. Colin Ferrell gives the most memorable performance as Jerry. In
Ferrell’s hands Jerry plays like a full on creepy rapist. When he’s got a
handle on his prey he might as well be a convicted pervert with his boner gaze
and sweaty swagger. And then, when he manages to get separated from his
prospective meals, Ferrell plays the character like a drug addict. He’s all
nervous twitches and paranoid glancing around. Usually Ferrell is pretty
understated, but Fright Night seems
to be his chance to show off. I liked watching what he did, but I’d complain
that he wasn’t scary enough. He was fun to watch, sure, but not scary. And in a
movie that didn’t bring the comedy as much as I was expecting, Fright Night should have made up for the
lack of gags with scares. The one shining comedic center of the film was David
Tennant’s performance as fraud vampire hunter/stage show legend Peter Vincent.
In Tennant’s hands Vincent is a Chris Angel type while on the stage, and a
Russell Brand character when off. I couldn’t quite tell if he was playing the
character in tribute to or in mockery of those (in?)famous personalities, but
either way what he does is funny. It’s a shame that he only shows up in that
already packed second half of the film, because the first half could have
really used him.
What makes this movie worth watching is that shotgun blast
of a second act. Once Jerry goes on the attack, it doesn’t let up with high
stakes, big spectacle action. And once Charley and Vincent suit up in vampire
hunting gear for the climactic assault on Jerry’s suburban lair, the movie goes
places that are so bad for our heroes that it would be a shame to give too much
of it away. Suffice to say, it was some of the coolest vampire related action
I’ve seen in a while. That Jerry, he sure knows how to spring a trap, and
probably it’s worth sitting through the lame first act to give it a gander.
Just don’t see it in 3D. Much has been said about the dimming effect 3D has on
a film’s image, and I’ve never seen a more distracting example of that than I
did here. Maybe this movie would look alright if shown in a top notch theater
who always makes sure they’re projecting with the newest, brightest bulbs; but
99% of the time that isn’t going to happen, and so much of the 3D action of
this film is shot in dimly lit spaces already that a large portion of it
becomes downright murky. I felt like I was watching through a layer of swamp
water. Save the extra couple bucks and keep the goofy looking glasses off.
