Fright Night : Review

“Fright Night” is an action comedy than a straight-out horror film. Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a nerd who has joined the cool crowd recently by dropping his oldest friend “Evil” Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) for a hot cheerleader girlfriend (Imogen Poots). Jerry Dandrige (Colin Farrell) is a single man, handsome and charming, who lives next door to the Brewsters to which charley’s mom (Toni Collette) takes a liking to. Charley’s friend Ed notices that students are going missing from their classroom and begins to suspect Jerry may be a vampire.  Ed’s attempts to convince Charley that Jerry is actually a vampire fail, but when Ed himself goes missing. Charley goes to the only person who might have the answer: Peter Vincent (David Tennant), the Las Vegas magician who boasts of supernatural knowledge on how to kill vampires.

Fright Night makes use of an ideal location: Las Vegas, a city of the night. It takes place in a suburban housing development of eerie isolation. Fright Night was inspired by a somewhat similar 1985 vampire movie of the same name.

Fright Night is directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Marti Noxon. The movie has competent acting by the principal actors with decent CGI with first class technical credits such as  production design (Richard Bridgland), art direction (Randy Moore), prosthetic makeup (Aurora Bergere) and cinematography (Javier Aguirresarobe).

Sometimes the original version of a movie is just a rough draft to be perfected later, and yet the default position for so many filmgoers is that the first is always the best. In the case of this new, killer version of “Fright Night,” they would be dead wrong. As vampire movies go, Fright Night is a pretty good one.

Share this: