There are many hidden gems to be found in the realm of 1980's horror films. Fright Night is not one of them. In theory, this should have been at least mildly entertaining. It's a horror-comedy about vampires. What could possibly go wrong? As is usual, the answer is everything.
From the start, Fright Night is doomed. The plot can easily be summed up as follows: After teenager Charley Brewster realizes his new neighbor is a vampire, he must enlist the help of a washed-up actor to save Charley's girlfriend from the bloodsucker's clutches. And that's literally it. No twists, no turns, no subplots, and certainly nothing interesting going on. The story often feels incomplete, and many scenes seem to drag on for no other reason than to pad the length of the movie.
The characters are also severely lacking. Normally this doesn't matter much in a horror film, as most characters are usually just there to die. But Fright Night insists that we care about these characters, to the point of trying to cram in character arcs in the 3rd act. But this is to no avail, because our cast is nothing more than a grab bag of 1980's character archetypes, most of whom strangely look like other (and better) actors. Our main character is an amalgamation of John Cusack types with a dash of Billy Peltzer from Gremlins. He's supposedly obsessed with horror movies, which I can only assume is because he always has his TV set to the late-night horror movie channel. Other than that, he's just like every other bland protagonist in 1980's teen movies.
For our side characters, we have the vague Sigourney Weaver lookalike as the girlfriend, who scoffs at Charley's tales of vampires living next door, until she randomly changes her mind and sticks with him wholeheartedly the rest of the film. Then there's the sidekick, Ed, who looks strangely like Beavis. Towards the end of the film, Ed randomly (and rather traitorously) lets himself be turned into a vampire, with the promise of no longer being picked on after joining the undead. This makes absolutely no sense, because his character is never once shown being bullied, and up until then seemed to be getting along quite well with everyone else. The last of our protagonists, Peter Vincent, is a washed up actor who runs a late night horror movie program on TV. He doesn't really do much other than serve as a sidekick after Ed turns evil, so there's not much worth mentioning. Our antagonist, a vampire named Jerry, is played with extreme blandness, on par with every other actor in this film. The actor playing him doesn't look very menacing in the first place, and he fails to make up for appearance with his acting.
The film is also billed as a horror-comedy, which is odd considering there's not a single joke in the whole film. The tone isn't even tongue-in-cheek. The closest Fright Night ever comes to being funny is the sidekick Ed, who is only funny because he looks eerily like Beavis, and that wasn't even intentional. On the subject of Ed, I'm pretty sure his character is meant to be humorous, but he never says anything that would qualify as a joke. There's no allusions to other horror films, no winks to the audience, no flat-out humorous dialog, and not even an ounce of slapstick in the fight scenes. And yet somehow this film is labelled a horror-comedy. By today's standards, the film is pretty dated, and that may get a laugh out of some people, but other than that this film legitimately tries to play itself serious.
Special effects are often the strongest suit of horror movies and can greatly improve the quality of an otherwise terrible film. This is almost true of Fright Night. Aside from a brief scene early in the film, Fright Night is a vampire film with a surprising lack of vampire-related special effects. Thankfully we do get a few good effects in during the end fight scene. At one point, Ed transforms into a wolf and is subsequently killed with a stair banister. He then slowly transforms back into a human, which is probably the only truly interesting effect in the movie. During the last few minutes of the film, Jerry the vampire briefly turns into a large bat, and while the creature is obviously on strings half of the time, the design of the creature is very convincing. We also get a bizarre melting-type death when Jerry's henchman gets stabbed with a stake and then sort of just turns into green goo. But despite the apparent effort put into the special effects, their time in the film is fleeting, and sadly crammed into the last 15 minutes of the movie.
Overall, this is a disappointing dud of a vampire movie. It fails to deliver the very few things it promised to begin with; cheap scares and a few laughs. Even as a B-Movie, the film is lacking. The acting is bad, but it never veers into the over-the-top territory. And while the plot and dialog are often lame, they're both coherent enough to still be taken seriously, so we don't get any goofy one-liners or ridiculously forced banter. But then again, this film never promised much to begin with. If you like B-Movies, you may still want to check this one out, if only for the special effects, but you can probably find the ending on Youtube and save yourself the trouble. They're really the only good part of this movie.
Enjoyment- 2/5
Quality- 2/5
IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089175/
September 19, 2012
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