Fright Night (The Remake)

Fright Night (2011)

74% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 143 reviews)

Runtime: 106 minutes

Directed by: Craig Gillespie

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

From: Dreamworks

Here is a movie I finally went to see; I listened to a podcast where I heard some strong arguments about the movie, ranging from “meh” to “hatred”, which is similar to what I’ve heard from both critics and movie-goers, although oddly enough the majority of the former actually liked this. I decided to watch this last night as I could offer up a different perspective as someone who hasn’t seen the 80’s Fright Night films (but I will eventually; I have both on VHS tape) and thus that won’t color my opinion on this movie just being another damn remake that really didn’t need to take place.

Overall… this movie wasn’t God-awful as I heard but it wasn’t all that good either. In Las Vegas, a former geek Charley (Yelchin) who now hangs out with “the cool kids” (including a guy who I noted looked a lot like James Franco; turns out, that was James’ younger brother) and ignores his old pal (McLovin’) and his claims that he somehow found a vampire named Jerry (Farrell); how he discovered that Jerry was a vampire wasn’t explained. A lot of things weren’t explained during the movie; there were many plotholes and you have to accept things such as no one caring about a structure exploding in fire or chaos at a casino. He, his prospective girlfriend (Poots), and his mom (Toni Collette) end up getting involved, and Charley ends up going to the Criss Angel-ripoff known as Peter Vincent (Tennant) as he’s also an expert in vampire lore. Will those two guys get together to battle Jerry the vampire? Will there be many goofy coincidences and chance meet-ups? What do you think?

This movie isn’t awful. After all, there are some exciting moments, and some humorous ones too; there is even an interesting idea or two. There just isn’t enough of that to balance out all of the dumb moments, aggravating and douche-y characters (most of the main ones you get to see), the giant logic gaps, and the griping that the characters unleash on each other. So, that’s why I say this movie isn’t that great, unless you want to see Lisa Loeb play McLovin’s mom in one brief scene. By the way, I got to see this in 2D, so seeing the obvious 3D stuff that way just made things silly.

I’ll be back Monday night.