Senior Charlie Brewster finally has it all -- he's running with the popular crowd and dating the hottest girl in high school. In fact, he's so cool he's even dissing his best friend Ed. But trouble arrives when an intriguing stranger Jerry moves in next door. He seems like a great guy at first, but there's something not quite right -- and everyone, including Charlie's mom, doesn't notice. After witnessing some very unusual activity, Charlie comes to an unmistakable conclusion: Jerry is a vampire preying on his neighborhood. Unable to convince anyone that he's telling the truth, Charlie has to find a way to get rid of the monster himself.
Genres: Comedy, Suspense/Horror and Remake Running Time: 2 hrs. Release Date: August 19th, 2011 (wide) MPAA Rating: R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references. Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Cast And Credits
Starring:
Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Imogen Poots
Directed by:
Craig Gillespie
Produced by:
Josh Bratman, Ray Angelic, Michael Gaeta
It is inevitable that “Fright Night,†a 3-D remake of a tongue-in-cheek, tooth-in-neck frightener from 1985, includes a mocking reference to “Twilight,†the vampire juggernaut that serves as both its target and its reason for being. Two estranged friends, Charley (Anton Yelchin) and Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), are snooping around in an empty house, and Charley is teasing Ed, his geeky boyhood pal, for believing in undead, fanged predators, implying that he is a closet fan of Stephenie Meyer’s swoony books and the movies they have spawned. “How dare you?†Ed sputters, in the midst of trying to explain that real vampires are nothing like the effete and sensitive immortals played by Robert Pattinson and his colleagues.
Of course not. Real vampires, for this movie’s purposes, are hunky guys with tight T-shirts and laid-back, seductive rock-’n’-roll manners. Like Jerry, for instance, a neighbor of Charley’s who is played, with a wink and snarl and a feline purr, by Colin Farrell. Mr. Farrell, who has lately been exploring his comic side (for instance with kimono and comb-over in “Horrible Bossesâ€) exaggerates Jerry’s menace just enough to underline the film’s satiric intentions, but not enough to subvert its earnest creepiness.
Directed by Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girlâ€) from a script by the television powerhouse Marti Noxon (“Mad Men,†“Buffy the Vampire Slayerâ€), “Fright Night†honors the original â€" written and directed by Tom Holland, with Chris Sarandon as the blood sucker next door â€" without falling into the traps of slavish fandom or smarty-pants spoofery. The old “Fright Night†was both self-aware and effectively scary, and if this one seems to prefer gruesome digital effects to old-fashioned bump-in-the-night spookiness, it still succeeds in keeping the audience both tickled and anxious.
Though there is a big, bloody and somewhat tedious finish, complete with fireballs and last-minute solutions to vexing supernatural problems, the filmmakers are in no hurry to arrive there, allowing a vague sense of weirdness to percolate through the early scenes. In the best ’80s horror-movie tradition, sociological and psychosexual implications hover around the edges of the frame and between the lines of the dialogue without becoming annoyingly explicit. The spoiled friendship of Charley and Ed has a quiet adolescent poignancy, as it becomes clear that Charley has abandoned the pal he used to dress up with in order to hang out with the cool kids.
Charley also has a sweet, cute girlfriend named Amy (Imogen Poots), but vampire business has a way of distracting him every time she is feeling amorous. Charley seems, even before Jerry’s true nature is revealed, to have some issues when it comes to love and friendship, hovering between sullenness and panic, and behaving like a jerk without quite meaning to or realizing what he is doing. He acts, in other words, remarkably like a real male teenager, a creature almost as likely to be misunderstood in a summertime movie as a vampire.
Charley and his mother, Jane (Toni Collette, whose professionalism is as seductive as Mr. Farrell’s impishness), live on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The desolation of their subdivision â€" real estate signs everywhere, on stakes that double as potential weapons â€" is especially haunting in these busted times, and there is something pointedly desperate about the way the residents cling to routines of normalcy.
Jerry may seem too sly and eccentric to be a metaphor, but since there is no such thing as a literal vampire, we have to assume that his presence in this landscape means something. And if “Twilight†and “True Blood,†in their different ways, register deep cultural worries and fantasies about sexuality, “Fright Night’s†fears seem to orbit around real estate, money and security. The hastily built, characterless, isolated houses that sprawl beyond recently booming cities may be haunted too.
But it is the prerogative of the genre to dispel allegory in a puff of smoke and a wash of blood, to which raucous laughter is added once David Tennant shows up as a Vegas stage magician â€" addicted to Midori liqueur and chafing in his tight leather pants â€" to whom Charley turns for help. With a nod to Russell Brand, but with his own special brand of louche ickiness, Mr. Tennant helps make a too-long and somewhat by-the-numbers last act easier to bear.
The 3-D throws some icky stuff in your face but is mostly not distracting and occasionally witty, which seems to be about what you can expect at this stage in the development of the format. Three-D is a neutral presence in a movie that has great fun with the possibility of evil.
It is inevitable that “Fright Night,†a 3-D remake of a tongue-in-cheek, tooth-in-neck frightener from 1985, includes a mocking reference to “Twilight,†the vampire juggernaut that serves as both its target and its reason for being. Two estranged friends, Charley (Anton Yelchin) and Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), are snooping around in an empty house, and Charley is teasing Ed, his geeky boyhood pal, for believing in undead, fanged predators, implying that he is a closet fan of Stephenie Meyer’s swoony books and the movies they have spawned. “How dare you?†Ed sputters, in the midst of trying to explain that real vampires are nothing like the effete and sensitive immortals played by Robert Pattinson and his colleagues.
Though there is a big, bloody and somewhat tedious finish, complete with fireballs and last-minute solutions to vexing supernatural problems, the filmmakers are in no hurry to arrive there, allowing a vague sense of weirdness to percolate through the early scenes. In the best ’80s horror-movie tradition, sociological and psychosexual implications hover around the edges of the frame and between the lines of the dialogue without becoming annoyingly explicit. The spoiled friendship of Charley and Ed has a quiet adolescent poignancy, as it becomes clear that Charley has abandoned the pal he used to dress up with in order to hang out with the cool kids. 
But it is the prerogative of the genre to dispel allegory in a puff of smoke and a wash of blood, to which raucous laughter is added once David Tennant shows up as a Vegas stage magician â€" addicted to Midori liqueur and chafing in his tight leather pants â€" to whom Charley turns for help. With a nod to Russell Brand, but with his own special brand of louche ickiness, Mr. Tennant helps make a too-long and somewhat by-the-numbers last act easier to bear. 
