Fright Night (2011)

I am of the opinion that the quality of a movie can often be judged by the type of person that occupies the audience. During my showing of Fright Night, there was a group of what I can only assume were very young teenagers who apparently had no common courtesy whatever, much less respect for the movie they were seeing. If my theory is correct, their appearance suggests that Fright Night is a movie with no real respect for its audience. It is a by-the-numbers remake of a movie from the 80s I haven't seen. I have to wonder if that movie was better than this one. I don't know, and maybe I'm being too harsh. But it seems to me that if somebody's going to go through all the cost and bother of making a movie, they should at least believe in what they're doing. The creators of Fright Night clearly did not think they were making anything worth seeing, as they constantly degrade their own movie with cheap laughs at the expense of the serious plot. Vampire movies have the potential of being too silly to begin with, so either go all the way with scares, or all the way with laughs, but don't give us a serious movie and then expect us to laugh.

Anton Yelchin stars as a young man who suspects that his neighbor, Colin Farrell, is a vampire after his geeky friend tries to convince him of such and disappears. Sure enough, he is a vampire. He bites the necks of everyone in town in only a couple days, which just doesn't seem very economical, even for a vampire. Then he burns down the young man's house and chases his family around in the middle of the desert. The young man then enlists a celebrity "expert" played by the here obnoxious David Tennant, who is alternately full of himself, cowardly, and heroic, all in the space of a few minutes. In between the slightly gory vampire attacks are the aforementioned self-defecating jokes that, to make matters worse, aren't funny, and there's a lot of them. Another major problem is the length. The dratted thing goes on and on and on with numerous resolutions piling on top of each other until everything finally comes to a cheerful little close after a solid two hours. Let me specify that I was not bored during the duration of the film, and I suspect that there are very few people who would be. I just didn't care.

Craig Gillespie directed Fright Night now a few years after a movie called Lars and the Real Girl that I never got around to watching, but it seemed more inspired than this. I am suddenly reminded of a vampire horror/comedy that did work as a comedy and a thriller on equal levels while also being creative and stylish. That movie was The Lost Boys. Watch it instead.

4/10