Fright Night Part 2

The first Fright Night is one of those movies that I somehow managed to miss out on my entire life, right up to last year sometime. When I finally did see it, I was pretty well blown away by it. It's a funny, well made horror comedy with a great premise, great characters and great creature effects that hold up well to this day. I think it's my second favorite vampire movie behind only Let the Right One In.

Not long after I saw Fright Night, I found out that there was a lesser-known sequel. So lesser known, in fact, that the DVD is incredibly rare, a downright collectors item to horror fans. I was talking about it with a friend of mine at the comic store, and he said he has it. Now, nearly a year later, I finally got the chance to see Fright Night Part 2.

Now, I don't want it to sound like I went into this movie with high expectations. I mean, horror sequels are rarely any good, and there's probably a reason that Fright Night Part 2 is so little known. I know this. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit excited to see the further adventures of Peter Vincent, Vampire Killer, and Charlie Brewster, Horny Teen as they battle the vampire Evil Ed...

...Which leads me to the first big disappointment: They couldn't get Evil Ed back. He turned the role down. If you've seen the first movie, you know the awesome sequel setup at the end. Well, necessity forced them to forget about it completely. What a missed opportunity! The dude gave such an interesting, weird performance in the first movie.

Instead, the story leaps forward a year or two, with Charlie Brewster away at college. He has a new girlfriend now, a roommate, and he's still in touch with Peter Vincent. But he doesn't believe the events of the first movie ever happened to him. His shrink has convinced him that it was some kind of mass hypnosis or something. Charlie spends much of the movie rationalizing all the weird vampire stuff that happens to him. I kind of hate it when sequels run through circles to reset the characters to where they were in the first one. But you know what? I'll give it a pass, because they actually have some fun with it.

Peter Vincent, the B-Movie star-turned TV host-turned vampire hunter, played brilliantly by Roddy McDowall, returns in the sequel unscathed. They don't reset his character, in fact, the events of the first movie have caused him a whole new set of problems in his life. People think he's cracked, and his show is again in danger. Forget that it was never really explained how he got his canceled show back at the end of the first movie. It's on the verge of cancellation again.

This time, our vampire villain is Regine, the vengeful sister of Jerry the Vampire, killed by Peter Vincent and Charlie in the first film. She comes to town with a whole gang of vampires and a werewolf in tow. She's using her vampiric hypnosis powers to dig her way into Charlie's mind, change him into a vampire, and screw with his friends' and girlfriend's life, much the way Jerry did in the first movie. OK, there are a lot of similarities to the first movie. A lot of retreading, with a few new flavors thrown in.

Regine's gang as pretty awesome in that they're hilariously and unapologetically 1980's. Regine passes herself as an avant garde performance artiste. There's a vampire girl on roller skates, an androgynous looking vampire, that big dude that was in Buffy a few times, and Jon Gries as the werewolf (not the same character he played in Monster Squad, though. I wonder if he worried about being typecast?).

There are a lot of weird and silly moments in Fright Night Part 2. Like when Peter Vincent gets fired from his show and replaced as host by Regine, who then just does a seductive interpretive dance for like five minutes. Really? When is she going to introduce the movie? And how awkward would that introduction have been, if after writhing around and cutting herself she looked at the camera and went "and now back to Ghost of Frankenstein"?

I liked Charlie and Peter Vincent again. William Ragsdale is fun, despite his newly acquired MacGyver Mullet, and Roddy McDowall really seems to appreciate the respect and dignity he's given in the role. Regine doesn't really have the menace and weight that Chris Sarandon brought to the villain role in the first one, but the addition of the gang makes up for that in some ways, I guess. The makeup and effects are about as good as they are in the first film, which is to say, pretty damn good. The showdown at the end is cool, and Peter Vincent, Vampire Killer's method of killing the vampire is actually quite clever.

A big problem I had was they were really unclear about the rules of being a vampire. The first movie very simply established that vampires followed the rules of Dracula. They can turn into wolves, bats, and mist, crosses and holy talismans hurt them, a stake to the heart kills them, etc. In the second one, there's some weird think with roses. And some blanket thing too. I didn't really get it, because it didn't make much sense in the context of the first movie. Why add rules? It was just like when Superman turned the S on his chest into a net and erased Lois Lane's memory with a kiss in Superman 2. Where did the new powers come from? Just stick with what was established!

Overall, Fright Night Part 2 doesn't really live up to the first one, nor should it be expected to. It was kind of doomed from the moment Evil Ed said no. Despite that, it's not irredeemable either, and I had a good time watching it with my friends, and was able to enjoy it as a movie while at the same time laughing at its many foibles. If you like the first movie and get an opportunity to see it, I think it's worth checking out.

And hey, there's a remake of the first movie coming out soon, right? And it looks genuinely cool, I think. Maybe they'll set up a second movie in the same way they did in the original, and maybe it will be a big hit, and we'll get the sequel we all really wanted to see in the first place, right? Maybe?