Fright Night

There’s a line early in Fright Night regarding the film’s vampire, “He’s a real monster. He’s not brooding, or lovesick, or noble. He’s the shark from Jaws.”

Indeed.

Like the 1985 film of the same name, this edition sees young Charley Brewster battling Jerry, a vampire living next door to him. Unlike the 1985 film, this version is a straight horror, closer in spirit to the movies the original satirized, than the original itself.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Colin Farrell plays Jerry like a wolf amongst sheep, dripping testosterone and itching to drop his human facade and unleash the beast within. It’s a magnetic and disturbing performance made more so by a scene in which we see Jerry feed on a young girl chained up in a closet, then amble downstairs through his dark, sparsely furnished house, grab a beer, plop down on the couch and stare mindlessly at reality television. He’s not the shark from Jaws. He’s a serial killer and he’s terrifying.

At least until the film throws logic out the window.

Once Jerry discovers that Charley’s onto him, Jerry blows up Charley’s house by digging up a gas main and yanking it out of the ground. When Charley and his mother escape, Jerry speeds after them in his pickup truck and attempts to run them off the road. I’m not questioning the vampire’s ability to do any of this, but if this is his usual modus operandi, how has he gone unnoticed for four hundred years? Exploding houses have a nasty habit of raising suspicion.

And then there’s the Peter Vincent character. Whereas the original film gave Roddy McDowall so much to work with in the premise of “What if Peter Cushing had to face a real Dracula?”, poor David Tennant has precious little. His character is no more than a plot device and the revelation that Jerry killed his family years ago feels contrived at best.

Lastly, there’s Charley. In the original he was the boy who cried wolf, but this time around it’s Charley’s estranged friend Ed who’s crying vampire and Charlie’s one of the non-believers. While the setup that Charley’s trying to distance himself from the geeky Ed in order to be more popular is interesting, it doesn’t go anywhere and only serves to make Charley an unsympathetic character. At least Anton Yelchin is convincing in the part.

A quick aside: after Ed tries and fails to convince Charley that Jerry is a vampire, we learn that he had footage of an invisible Jerry getting out of his car (vampire’s don’t cast a reflection and thus can’t be filmed) that he could have just shown Charley or at least uploaded to the internet.

Yet, despite all these shortcomings, this new Fright Night does have some good scares to offer, and Tennant’s early scenes are a hoot. As a remake it doesn’t so much tarnish the legacy of the original as much as it fails to live up to it.