FRIGHT NIGHT (2011)

Okay, so I know that I've been typically posting about older movies, but sometimes something new comes along that deserves the attention.

There have been WAY too many remakes of older movies going on lately. It seems like every horror movie that comes out is a remake of something that was done better before, and just shoved out onto movie screens because the name is familiar enough to fill some seats. That's why I was really skeptical about a remake of Fright Night. The original is SO GOOD. Chris Sarandon is great as Jerry the vampire. He's a total badass killing machine. And while the original is *funny,* it's not really a *comedy.* It's a horror movie with a lot of comic relief. And that's okay. When I saw that they'd cast McLovin from Superbad as Evil Ed, I thought that they'd screwed this whole thing up and made it into a wacky comedy about a vampire neighbor.

MAN, I WAS WRONG. The changes they made to the story worked completely. Changing the location to Las Vegas makes total sense -- so many people there work at night, people are always moving to and from there, and you can imagine the place being surrounded by half-empty subdivisions like the one Charley Brewster lives in. It's the perfect place for a vampire to set up camp. And the relationship between Charley and Ed makes sense, too. Charley is trying to be one of the "cool kids." He's got a hot, popular girlfriend, and he's started to try and put his geeky past behind him, so Ed feels neglected and left out. And it makes sense that Ed would be the guy to suspect the truth right off the bat and try to convince Charley instead of the other way around.

One of the things that really worried me was knowing that Peter Vincent wouldn't be a horror movie host in this one. In the original, Roddy McDowell plays a pretty thinly-disguised Peter Cushing variation who's washed up and reduced to hosting horror movies on TV. But today, we don't really have horror movie hosts. Elvira is back after being gone for FOREVER, and you can catch Svengoolie if you're lucky on syndicated TV, but most people aren't familiar with horror movie hosts. (Actually, if it wasn't for the fact that I READ EVERYTHING about horror movies, I probably wouldn't know anything about them either. I've only seen Elvira and Svengoolie in action. I've seen some other hosts on YouTube clips and some bootleg DVD compilation things, but it's mostly through reading about these guys that I know anything at all.) But they wound up changing the character to a Las Vegas celebrity magician, like Criss Angel. They give him the completely put-on "coolness" of Criss Angel (who HAS TO BE THE BIGGEST PAIN IN THE ASS IN THE WORLD), and the actual coolness of Penn & Teller (namely the HUGE collection of occult memorabilia). And David Tennant plays him! The 10th Doctor! He's hilarious, and his relationship with his "assistant" is amazing. I want to see another movie about this guy. I told Dad that he kept drinking Midori all through the movie, and Dad's reaction was "this guy is a hangover just waiting to happen." I guess if you just *stay* drunk all the time, that you don't ever have to worry about that, though. I should ask Cady.

But it isn't a vampire movie without a vampire, and Colin Farrell plays Jerry to the hilt. We've had enough of sparkly brooding emo vampire assclowns, and Jerry is just a predator. He's charming enough when he has to be, but you can always see that just under the surface, that he's always scheming and trying to outwit those around him. He's dangerous, and you never are allowed to forget it. He's not going to be going vegan like some other vamps I could mention.

The tone of the movie is just right, too. It hits just the right balance of tense horror and light humor. You never feel like what's going on isn't seriously life-threatening. Things are BAD, and the laughter comes from things that happen naturally from the characters, not cartoon-y wackiness (even though there's nothing WRONG with cartoon-y wackiness...I'm a BIG FAN of cartoon-y wackiness, just not where it's not going to work, and it wouldn't work here).

So I'm gonna say that YOU NEED TO SEE THIS. It isn't often that a good horror movie comes around, especially one that's a remake of a movie you'd never think would need to be remade in the first place. This one does it right.