FRIGHT NIGHT

There’s something to be said for appreciating honesty. Ever have someone tell you a hard truth, and while you might not have wanted to hear it – and perhaps even felt worse now that you know it – you can’t help but respect the person who had the courage to tell it like it is? Well, it turns out it can be found in film too.

Like when an old B movie gussies itself up as an A movie, but makes no bones about the fact that it’s still a B movie…just with a bit more money to spend.

Charley (Anton Yelchin) seems to have more than a few things figured out. We see in him a few traces of a one-time geek, but he’s wearing better clothes, acting a bit more confident, and wouldn’t you know it – he even has a pretty girl named Amy (Imogen Poots) on his arm. We’re given glimpses of who he used to be, and Charley seems to have reinvented himself rather nicely.

His lifestyle is thrown for a loop though, when an old friend from his nerdier days presses him for help. Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is convinced that their mutual friend isn’t just absent from class – something bad has in fact happened to him. After blackmailing Charley into helping him investigate, he drops his bomb of a conspiracy theory: Ed figures that Charley and his mom Jane (Toni Collette) are living next to a vampire.

Charley laughs it off and breaks away fromEd for good, but it turns out that Ed might be a nerd, but isn’t an incorrect nerd. Charley’s neighbourJerry (Colin Farrell) is in fact a vampire…feasting on the citizens of a Las Vegas suburb. The set-up is perfect since Vegas is both a nocturnal city, and one populated by very transient folks. Few raise an eyebrow if people are out til all hours…or even suddenly gone.

When Charley decides that something needs to be done about Jerry, he turns to Peter Vincent (David Tennant). Vincent is an illusionist whose show plays Vegas nightly, and seems to know a thing or two about vampires. “Seems” is the operative word in that sentence though. When he gives Charley the brush-off, you get the hunch that suburban life is about to get bloody in a hurry for Charley and his family.

If you’ve come looking for how this film stacks up against its 1980’s original, or for a rant about how remakes are the work of the Devil, then you’ve come to the wrong place. You see, I’ve never actually watched the original…which might be the best way to come into something like this, since it means I’m not always mentally referring back. What’s more is the fact that the original FRIGHT NIGHT isn’t exactly what I’d call a holy relic – a film so perfectly created that to tinker with it would be to blaspheme (see: GUESS WHO?).

What I think FRIGHT NIGHT has done best, is evoke the pseudo-B-movie spirit of it’s predecessor. The film never plays things earnestly, especially where characters like Peter Vincent and Jerry Dandridge are concerned. Tennant and Farrell always seem to have this glint of joy in their eye as they deliver their lines (their sometimes very hammy lines). Since these two gentlemen carry most of the film’s runtime, that sense of silliness permeates into the movie. Soon we’re left shaking our heads at the lunacy unfolding, but never feeling the smile fade away.

This is an odd case where everything I know is telling me that a film is bad, but I can’t find it in myself to really care. Every nighttime scene looks muddy as hell, the 3-D trickery is played for cheap thrills (though a brick thrown at the camera did make me flinch), and the film’s pacing is wildly off.  Anton Yelchin gives us nothing memorable for his massive amount of screentime, and the film even commits the cardinal sin of making Toni Collette uninteresting.

So after doing all the math, if you said to me “Hey, I feel like a movie today – Should I go see FRIGHT NIGHT?”, my answer is “no”. The plain and simple truth is that FRIGHT NIGHT just isn’t very good.

But…

In seeing those scenes of Jerry go all Prince-of-Darkness on his neighbourhood…witnessing the 3-D trickery involving details like sparks, blood, and stakes…and even getting a laugh or two at lines like “You read iwayi too much Twilight”, I get an undeniable feeling. It’s the feeling that the people responsible for making this film probably saw it for the first time as the third title at a drive-in triple feature. That they were raised on pulp horror films with bad effects and worse acting. It’s a grindhouse homage that doesn’t try to overemphasize the greatness of grindhouse.

Oddly, I have to give FRIGHT NIGHT props for sparking this conflict within me. It’s the complete opposite of seeing a film you can respect for its merits but ultimately don’t like. And in many ways it’s a more difficult landing to stick, since problematic films usually exhaust us to the point of anger. To sidestep that wooden stake and still have some bit left in its fangs tells me that FRIGHT NIGHT was worth the time and money…

…Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Matineescore: ★ ★ 1/2 out of ★ ★ ★ ★

What did you think? Please leave comments with your thoughts and reactions on FRIGHT NIGHT.