The remake of Fright Night is a film that would seem to have quite a bit going for it, most of all its cast. A project starring such talented actors as Anton Yelchin, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Colin Farrell would seem intriguing, but this film has one problem that keeps it from being the slightest bit effective: it completely fails as a horror film. It makes no real attempt to create genuine suspense outside of the most superficial and unsurprising shocks. There is no mystery to be solved or questions to be asked here; every action is meant to be taken at face value. Each plot development can be seen a mile away, and not a moment is milked to its fullest extent. Fright Night doesn’t resemble a horror film so much as it resembles a particularly dull action film. The film’s title isn’t a complete lie, however. Much of the film indeed takes place at night, making it a rough watch when you’re wearing those 3-D glasses.
Yelchin plays Charley Brewster, a high school student who is trying to move on from his geeky past with old friend Ed (Mintz-Plasse). When Ed tells him that his new next door neighbor Jerry (Farrell) is a vampire, Charley is less than receptive to the concept. Then things start to get weirder and weirder until he seeks the advice of the famous vampire hunter/Criss Angel wannabe Peter Vincent (Tennant). As Jerry becomes even more menacing, Charley fears that his girlfriend (Imogen Poots) and mother (Collette) are in danger.
That is more or less the extent of it, though the film itself is much less coy about whether or not Jerry is really a vampire. Because he is. This is made clear early and often, and Fright Night completely ignores the compelling mystery it could have had if it actually made the audience skeptical. This problem is not contained to this central mystery; the film has chance after chance to create a genuinely suspenseful horror sequence but it botches every one. It merely moves from one scene to the next without discipline, and it leaves the actors to try and elevate the materiel to something better. To be sure, some of the jokes land because the cast knows how to deliver them. This makes Fright Night come off as little more than a colossal waste of not inconsiderable resources.
The film in general has little interest in characters that aren’t Charley or Peter Vincent. Everyone else just exists to move the plot forward or give Charley motivation to fight Jerry. His girlfriend doesn’t have much of a personality as far as we can tell, and Collette is completely tossed aside and given absolutely nothing to do. Even two characters introduced as Charley’s new best friends (Dave Franco and Reid Ewing, who you may know as James’ brother and Dylan from Modern Family, respectively) have about five minutes of screen time and none of it has any relevance to anything. Fright Night is a film without interest in developing its characters or building its universe. It feels like it took the barebones concept, fast-tracked it into production and came out the other end with a half-baked film.
Besides the plot and character problems, Fright Night is just not a very pleasant film to look at. The 3-D is mostly unnecessary, unless you are aching for a couple shots of things flying in your face unconvincingly that exist merely to justify the process. Where some films like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and even Final Destination 5 are making progress in the 3-D department—despite their obvious flaws as films—Fright Night just has nothing to offer in the as far as visuals are concerned. More and more night scenes in movies have been impossibly dim lately, and entire sequences of Fright Night are far too difficult to decipher. It is tiresome in every way that a movie can be.
Parts of Fright Night seem to be going for some Scream-esque deconstruction of vampire movie clichés, but unlike Scream it fails to work as an entertaining film in its own right. Director Craig Gillespie was the recipient of some indie acclaim with his 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl, but it’s hard to see any kind of directorial stamp or ambition here. This remake of Fright Night seems like it was made simply to cash in on the current popularity of vampire films, and given the not-bad premise it’s somewhat easy to see why it attracted so many talented people. And indeed, all of them perform as well as possible in their roles given the circumstances. (People will undoubtedly like Tennant—and he’s often good—but at times he seems like little more than Aldous Snow’s twin brother.) It’s unfortunate, then, that the film they wound up in was a cobbled-together mess that will fail to separate itself from the vampire films it tries (and fails) to poke fun at. It’s just another one, and a bad one at that.
GRADE: C-
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