Fright Night (2011)

If you've read my review to the sequel to the original, you know that Fright Night is one of my favorite vampire movies. Not only was it full of 80's charm, it was also, at that point, a totally original take on the genre, with fun performances, great characters, and a little bit of self awareness.

Now we have a remake, which, while not very necessary, strives to honor the original and still bring something new to the idea for fans like me. They could have gone wrong in a lot of ways with this. They could have taken it in a soapy, mopey Twilight direction. Or they could have made one of those typical, lowest common denominator horror movies. Instead, director Craig Gillespie used the original movie as a blue print, balancing the horror and the comedy, taking the ideas behind the original characters and putting a new spin on them.

The basic premise of Fright Night is that a vampire moves in next door to a horny teen. Nobody believes the teen and the vampire starts taunting him and messing with his life by seducing his mom and girlfriend. The teen then recruits a washed up celebrity known for playing a vampire hunter to help him hunt and kill his neighbor.

The remake stays pretty true to that, but at a certain point maybe halfway through, it strays from the storyline of the original in a pretty big way, making the movie bigger in scale, and taking advantage of the bigger budget and special effects now available.

Anton Yelchin plays Charlie Brewster, the hormonal teen. In the original, he was a big horror movie geek, who always watched his hero, Peter Vincent, host a crappy horror movie showcase on local TV. In this iteration, he's set aside his geekiness, abandoning his old friends for some douchey new ones, landing a hot girlfriend, and buying expensive limited edition shoes. Fitting in with the cool kids is top priority for this Charlie, whereas in the original, getting laid and watching horror movies seemed to be all he had on his mind.

Colin Farrell takes over for Chris Sarandon as Jerry the vampire. It's pretty perfect casting. You can tell he's having a blast. He goes from charming neighbor to unholy terror on a dime. He taunts Charlie like a cat playing with its prey.

Charlie's girlfriend Amanda, played by Imogene Poots, is given quite a bit more to do in the remake, than be the object of both Charlie and Jerry's lust. In fact, both of the main female roles have been beefed up a great deal. Toni Collette plays Charlie's mom, and the close mother-son relationship Charlie has with her that's only kind of hinted at in the original is explored much deeper here.

Charlie's nerdy best friend Evil Ed is played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. His character is one of the more different takes from the original. The original Evil Ed was a little unhinged from the get-go. He seemed like someone who might snap one day and take a weapon to school and shoot up the place or something. There were even some less-than-subtle implications of sexual confusion. That stuff is all gone. This Evil Ed is nothing more than a spurned best friend, hurt that the guy he's been hanging out with since he was a kid has moved on. He's on to Jerry long before Charlie is, in fact, he's the one that brings it to his attention. He's also the one that leads Charlie to Peter Vincent.

Which leads us to Peter Vincent, with David Tennant from Doctor Who filling in for the great Roddy MacDowell. This version of Peter Vincent has been completely retooled from the ground up. You can't really have a washed-up B-Movie actor-turned-horror show host anymore, since those shows don't really exist nowadays. Instead, Peter Vincent has been reinvented as a gothy, pompous, drunk, Vegas magician, with a vampire themed magic act. It's a pretty bold reinvention to say the least, but Tennant goes pretty wild with it, and really makes it fun. Once the action is taken to Vegas, we get some really cool action in his suite, which is filled with all sorts of old vampire hunting artifacts he's collected off of eBay. I did miss the original hero-worship relationship between the original Charlie and Peter. Instead, you get to see a mirror between the two. Peter Vincent is a geek trying way too hard to look cool, and unlike Charlie, he's overcompensating a bit much.

The script was written by Marti Noxon, the former Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer who was Joss Whedon's second-in-command on the latter half of the series. She brings a lot of Buffy-ness to this movie, with the clever dialogue and the teen hormones. Buffy surely owes a lot to the original Fright Night, so it makes perfect sense to use it as a template.

Now, before I go, a did have a couple of issues with Fright Night 2011. One being it just wasn't sexy enough. The original was all about sex, from the very first scene being Charlie on the verge of losing his virginity. The atmosphere was thick and foggy, tension that you could cut with a knife. This one is notably dampened, with Charlie's main motivation being shifted to fitting in, Evil Ed's sexuality done away with completely, and even the foggy atmosphere is gone. I know it has a lot to do with these being different times, showing teenagers having and pursuing sex in a movie is a bit touchier nowadays, even though it still happens all the time in the real world.

My other main issue was the 3-D. Like most discerning movie-goers, I skip 3-D entirely, and I saw Fright Night in 2-D. But there were a lot of intrusive shots of things flying directly at the camera. There were also weird CG effects, like a shot of embers floating in the air around Charlie that didn't look integrated with the picture at all. Making a movie in 3-D shouldn't get in the way of the 2-D experience. In the long run, way more people are going to see it in the glorious second dimension. But I guess people expect things to jump out at you in these movies, so they shoehorn a few shots like that in.

Those few gripes aside, I thought Fright Night was a fun, quirky horror comedy, though I still liked the original better. It probably doesn't have a lot of mainstream appeal, but should please fans of the original, fans of Buffy, and fans of the old vampire movies when they were still monsters who didn't sparkle.