Fang Girls

Year: 2016

Director: Melanie Aitkenhead

Cast: Leila George, Tori Spelling, Emily Meade

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Sometimes spectacularly bad ideas create iconic moments in cinema. Who would have thought that the story of a time-traveling, nude Austrian robot would become one of the most beloved franchises in history? Or that the story of zen space dudes and a princess battling a plastic man with an iron lung over a big skyball would change Hollywood forever? So, by that metric, producer James Franco’s idea to resurrect the cult classic Lifetime erotic thriller Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? as a lesbian vampire film should have produced an out-and-out masterpiece.

I wonder why it didn’t?

In Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, Leah Lewisohn (Leila George) is a college theater student who’s deeply in love with her girlfriend Pearl (Emily Meade), despite the complete lack of concrete evidence to support that assertion. Pearl is a photographer, so literally every date is a photo shoot that eventually morphs into a Charmin-soft softcore lesbian bacchanal of face touching, finger licking, and Cirque du Soleil dry humping that would be physically impossible to enjoy without a penis. I don’t think they even talk!

Anyway, Leah brings Pearl home to dinner with her mom (Tori Spelling), who after an hour of face-touching and sultry whispering, begins to suspect that maybe these two aren’t just friends. When Leah drops the bombshell that she’s a lesbian, Tori shuts down and leaves the room because apparently she’s not a fan of Ellen. Seriously, she’s a non-religious single mom in 2016. Who the f**k is still that cut up about this stuff? Anyway, Tori begins to look into Pearl’s background and discovers that not everything is as it seems.

You see, Pearl is a Nightwalker, this universe’s lazy name for “vampire” (she literally explains it as “I’m a Nightwalker. You know, like a vampire?”). She was bitten by an ex and inducted into a group of Heathers-esque sexy vamps who stalk around in high heels snarling at each other. They want her to make Leah a vampire for reasons that make sense zero percent of the time, but she wants to get her consent rather than force it on her. Also, if you vampify your one true love, you don’t have to hunt humans and can subsist off one another for the rest of eternity.

Because vampires CAN’T be monsters! They’re so sexy!

If the goal of Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? was to capture the feel of a lost relic unearthed from the 90’s, it definitely worked. It looks exactly like the kind of acid-washed garbage pumped out by the likes of Joe Chappelle. Good on them, but authenticity does not imply quality. The fact that the film is full of bared midriffs, stalking girl groups, and a preponderance of irritating flash cuts just shows that the film is pandering to the nostalgic signposts of the Buzzfeed generation, not that they actually knew how to make a movie.

Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is an unmitigated disaster, and not the fun kind. It’s a stilted, monotonous slog liberally slathered with padding so egregious I’m pretty sure it violates the Geneva Conventions. The endless photography sessions, on-the-nose monologues, and oddly fidgety aerial-view transition shots of a random city desperately attempt and miserably fail to distract from the facts that 1) This movie has no plot, 2) Tori Spelling is barely in it, an 3) producer and top-billed actor James Franco is in it even less, in shots that make it patently clear he wasn’t even on set with his scene partners. He might as well have Skyped in from his living room

Come to think of it, if we can safely assume that his taste in decor is questionable, that actually might be how he did it.

Did I mention that eeeevery sceeeene is in sloooow mooootion? It’s like they shot half the movie in Matrix-style bullet time, but instead of dodging missiles, they’re walking up a driveway in crop tops. Although, maybe it’s for the best that it happened this way. If it was all played at regular speed, that would leave us with an extra 20 minutes to fill, leading to a sad attempt to squeeze even more material out of a script that seems fundamentally disinterested in itself.

How else could you exlain the half-baked vampire mythology that never coheres into anything interesting or even comprehensible? We don’t know how these Nightwalkers operate, or why they do what they do. We don’t even know their names! And even though the film is obsessed with Scream 2-esque classroom scenes discussing the relevant topics of queerness and vampirism in literature, it seems unwilling to integrate that material into anything but the dustiest puff of a theme.

And then the story just goes bugnuts at the halfway point, forgetting that Leah lives in a dorm so she can constantly run to her bedroom after door-slamming arguments with her mom, wickedly contorting the wimpy side character Bob (Nick Eversman) – which, by the way, is not a name any modern college student would go by – into a cavorting demon of male entitlement, and utterly failing to stick the landing on its romantic arc.

The acting is terrible (especially in the scenes where they’re supposed to be wowing an audience with their performance of Shakespeare – a little bit of magical realism for ya), the plot is stunted and fails to do right by its cardboard characters, and – here’s the kicker – it’s just plain boring. There’s nothing worse than a boring bad movie, but its even more painful here because Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? has such a wonderfully nutty concept. The only upside is some fun restaging of Shakespeare, and the opportunity to mock just how slow on the uptake Tori Spelling is about her daughter’s lesbianism. She’s like a clueless sitcom dad and it’s great.

But yeah, like its main characters, this movie sucks. Don’t let it seduce you with its softcore flailing and irresistible synopsis.

TL;DR: Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is a disappointingly dull movie that engages not at all with its bonkers conceit.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1040

Popcorn Kernels: The Vampire Strikes Back

Please enjoy this savory sampling of mini-reviews from the second half of Scream 101’s vampire month.

Fright Night (For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1985

Director: Tom Holland

Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A teen boy begins to suspect that his new next-door neighbor might be a vampire.

I’ve had a pretty bad run of luck when it comes to visiting classic vampire flicks I’ve never seen before. Sometimes a lack of nostalgia can be devastating, which seems to be the case whenever I watch Tom Holland movies. Just like Child’s Play before it, I found Fright Night terribly underwhelming. Although it has many of the 80’s horror trappings I’ve come to appreciate in a movie, it just lacks a certain oomph that would keep me invested.

The trouble is, I really get what it’s doing. Fright Night transplants gothic horror into modern suburbia, as literally represented by vampire neighbor Jerry Dandridge’s spooky giant mansion nestled between all the cozy two-story homes. It’s attempting to resurrect a legendary monster for the youth of today. Well, back when “today” meant 1985. But the execution stakes that concept in the heart.

Everything about Fright Night is inconsistent, from the acting (Stephen Geoffrey’s Evil Ed is a shrill, cartoonishly broad abomination) to the pacing (the  film lulls about every 20 minutes – it’s like a built-in naptime) to the rules governing what exactly its monsters can do (nothing is more frustrating than Dandridge’s live-in, totally-not-gay handyman, who can run around in direct sunlight unmolested, but is later revealed to be impervious to bullet wounds and weak against stakes to the heart – is he halfway through a vampire correspondence course or what?). And every scene lasts about three minutes longer than it should. This must be one of Paul Feig’s favorite movies.

The only instance where the execution is actually stronger than the concept is the special effects. When they come into play (and they take astoundingly long for a movie of his vintage,), they’re undoubtedly terrific, thanks to the work of I, Madman’s Randall William Cook. But they arise inorganically from the story, rarely if ever making sense in context. Fright Night stops dead in its tracks for these elongated sequences without seeming to realize that they belong to some other, better film. Fright Night is enjoyable enough, but it’s too all-over-the-place to be coherent. I definitely don’t get the mass appeal of this one.

Rating: 6/10

Vampyres (For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1974

Director: Joseph Larraz

Cast: Marianne Morris, Anulka Dziubinska, Murray Brown 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pair of lesbian vampires lure men to their secluded castle, seduce them, and drink their blood.

One of the most influential subgenres in vampire cinema is the lesbian vampire movie, because horror films have almost always been made by men and men are almost always terrified of women. There was perhaps no better time for the genre than the 70’s, a time of women’s liberation and sexual awakening that was scaring buttoned-up menfolk out of their wits. Of course, when you’re dealing with a genre trafficking in softcore exploitation, the results are always one of two things: unintentionally hilarious or insufferably dull. Vampyres, the 1974 British entry in the genre, is emphatically the latter, British cinema being what it is.

What do you think of when you think of vampire films? Glistening fangs dripping in blood? Caped strangers turning into bats? Garlic and cross and silver, oh my? Well, you’re gonna get none of that in Vampyres, which I guess could be a refreshing take on the genre if it tried to tell any story whatsoever. Marianne Morris and Anulka, as our central couple seem to be acting according to their own private script. Perhaps it’s titled Real Housewives of Transylvania, because pretty much all they do is drink whine while they talk to or about men. And then they shower together sometimes. Y’know. Lesbian stuff.

Vampyres is trapped in an endless cycle of the two women walking to the road (every step is captured in hypnotic detail), flagging down men, having boring philosophical conversations, sleeping with them, and only occasionally killing them. While Vampyres utterly fails as a piece of erotica no thanks to its slipshod, handheld camerawork and acting flatter than the actresses’ resolutely fangless teeth), the centerpiece of its utter suckitude is its extreme lack of horror. The ladies barely exercise their vampiric nature (to the point that it could be argued that they merely think they’re vampires, á là George Romero’s Martin), and when they do the violence is all reactionary. There are no fangs piercing flesh, just two busty women licking blood off a previously injured man like he’s a Thriftee cone.

The tedium in Vampyres is scorching, and the lack of any decent sex or violence renders it literally and figuratively toothless. It fails to provide a single reason for it to exist, and it takes after its characters by completely lacking any semblance of inner life. In the film, vampires Fran’s life goal is to search for interesting people. I have a similar goal, to search for interesting movies. My advice? Look far, far away from Vampyres.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 870

Reviews In This Series

Fright Night (Holland, 1985)

Fright Night (Gillespie, 2011)

Popcorn Kernels: Fangs For The Memories

Everyone, please welcome back our dear friend Scream 101! The podcast has risen from the grave for a second season, and this September we’re all about vampires. Please enjoy a set of mini-reviews about the first two flicks in the lineup.

Dracula (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1931

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

C’mon.

I do my best to approach classic horror with the respect it deserves, bringing as much context as possible to understand why people might have been scared of it back in the day, even if it doesn’t phase modern audiences. I get how Psycho shocked a post-Code audience and respect its tense thriller mechanics. I understand Halloween’s game-changing, stylish approach even if it doesn’t particularly spook me. And every time I watched The Exorcist… OK, The Exorcist is still terrifying. I’m just saying, I’m not speaking as a live Tweeting, torture porn-bred millennial when I say that the massively important, influential-even-to-this-day 1931 Universal smash hit Dracula is a pretty awful movie.

Please keep in mind that I don’t hate all Universal horror. Bride of Frankenstein is a doggone triumph. It’s just that Dracula is cut off at the knees twice over by its source material. While Dracula works well as an epistolary novel, its meandering, country-hopping plot is not the stuff of great cinema. And then our Dracula goes one step further by actually adapting its script from a stage play based on the novel, confining that addled narrative into one suffocating location.

The pacing chokes on its own blood as a handful of characters shout at one another, circling back to the same points over and over again. And far be it from me to knock an iconic performance, but Bela Lugosi is no Karloff. His slow-as-molasses line deliveries are just exhausting. The word “boring” is bandied about a lot when it comes to movies released more than a decade before our time, but Dracula truly earns that description. 

There are exactly three things that are genuinely good about Dracula, and they are what prevent it from teetering over a precipice of despair and tedium. First is Dwight Frye, our Renfield. Frye just goes for it, bringing an immutable energy to the role that sends him careening up into the rafters, but appropriately sells the character’s stylized insanity. The second stems off from that over-the-top quasi-expressionism: the production design of settings that aren’t the main mansion. Dracula’s castle is an excellent chiaroscuro nightmare, and the staircase in his London hideout is a deliciously overwrought jagged cliff.

The third and final element is one scene, a bedtime conversation between Mina and Lucy that thrums with naturalistic chemistry, providing a tiny breath of fresh air between all the hammy tagines. But a couple gasps do not a full lung make. I’d rather be buried six feet under than spend an eternity with Dracula, and that’s exactly what this 80 minute expanse of celluloid felt like.

Rating: 3/10

Let the Right One In (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2008

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young Swedish boy falls in love with the girl who moves in next door, only to discover that she’s a vampire.

I love the book Let the Right One In, as it’s one of the few works of modern literature that has turned my stomach as I was reading it. That might explain why I’m so chilly toward its film adaptation, which defangs most of its more questionable content in favor of a languorous arthouse vibe. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Let the Right One In is a great arthouse horror movie, but I’m well aware of what it could have been, which is supremely frustrating.

But it’s only fair, I suppose, to focus on what it is. Which is beautiful. Like many a Scandinavian film, Let the Right One In uses sprawling fields of snow as giant canvasses of negative space onto which it paints its frame. Given that vampire films tend to predominately feature blood, this aesthetic is especially suited for the subgenre, juxtaposing lurid reds against the pure white snowfall. This is especially especially meaningful when you consider that both our monster and our twisted protagonist falling for her are children, the traditional innocents.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in Let the Right One In, though you might not suspect that from its sedate pacing. It truly succeeds in combining thoughtful, thematic imagery with intensely visceral horror, sometimes even in the same frame. Certain moments are achieved so elegantly that they could be framed and put in a gallery, even though they depict, say, a woman being engulfed in flame or a man burning off his own face with acid. … Maybe I’m being too harsh when I judge this movie for not being hardcore enough.

And let’s not discount the film’s love story, which is believably clumsy, childish, sweet, and dark. The two child actors are superb, especially Lina Leandersson, whose Eli has the eyes of someone who has seen a million lifetimes come and go.

Hell, Let the Right One In is terrific. I don’t love it, because I sometimes have trouble penetrating its icy exterior, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t sing its praises and recommend it to fans looking for more intellectual horror fare.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 926

Abe Ruthless

Year: 2012

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Cast: Benjamin Walker, Rufus Sewell, Dominic Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Let me just say that there is very little reason for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to exist. Based on the lesser-known mashup property by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies scribe Seth Grahame-Smith, the concept is so fundamentally strange that it seemed unlikely that the ever-so-safe Hollywood studios would ever take a whack at it, let alone throw Tim Burton on as executive producer and pour 70 million into its coffer. 

The fact that it's quite fun - much better than it should have ever possibly been able to be - is also surprising, but I continue to lie back in awe at the fact that the monstrosity was ever given the chance to exist in the first place. But here we are. Also, we can all look forward to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in cinemas in 2015 directed by the guy who did 17 Again, so never ever tell me that the world isn't an incomprehensibly wonderful place sometimes.

There should be whole new fields of science invented to discover how this film came to be. And to see if we can tap into that to get Saw VIII: The Battle of Jigsaw Island off the ground.

The plot is presumably self-explanatory, but I'll jam through it for formality's sake. Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) lost his mother to a vampiric plantation owner (Marton Csokas) as a child and, once he grows up, is taken under the wing of expert hunter Henry (Dominic Cooper). While he attempts to balance his friendship with childhood buddy Will (Anthony Mackie) and relationship with - of all people - Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with the stern, lonely life of a vampire hunter, a team of vicious Southern vampires led by Adam (Rufus Sewell) and his sister Vadoma (Erin Wasson) make eeeeeevil plans in the shadows.

There's actually a rather large amount of mythology bundled up in the film (evidently vampires can endure sunlight just fine, but they lack they ability to murder one another), both vampiric and otherwise. The attention to detail is impressive, though I am of the opinion that the film leans far too heavily on the book for an accurate understanding of the universe's (and the characters') mechanics.

Far too many moments feel rushed, especially some of the more emotional beats, leaving the impression that maybe you accidentally sat on the remote and skipped ahead a couple scenes. Attempting to coast through on the details of the novel, Mary Todd's character is glossed over with a generic "modern woman in olden times" sheen and Henry especially is (from what I have been told) not given his due diligence, his brutal and vivid origin story from the book instead replaced with a treacly vignette.

Now we'll never know how he can tree-lean so flawlessly.

But for all the dashed-off character material (Why does Mary Todd fall in love with Lincoln? Because history says so, that's why.) and chockablock narrative, AL:VH makes up with gonzo action setpieces that not only go over the top but send the top itself careening into a different dimension. We get slow-mo explosions of blood and splinters! A combination battle axe/musket! Men atop a runaway train on a burning bridge! A footrace atop a stampede of horses!

The whole affair is unfortunately laden with a heavy blanket of CGI, but the action is too nonstop to be bothered with handwringing about it. And while the details are a little cloudy, the broad strokes of the plot are campy genius. The film elects to ignore historical fact (I mean, duh) in favor of a stark black-and-white Civil War tale in which the Pure Good Abe Lincoln fights off the Wicked Monsters of the South - all the vampires are plantation owners who keep slaves in order to feed. If that's not the most zanily patriotic metaphor you've ever in modern American cinema, please let me know in the comments so I can watch that other movie right now.

And honestly, the screenwriter and make-up artist conspire to create what can only be described as an inutterably accurate portrayal of how our 16th president would speak, look, act and think if he had come from a background of vampire hunting rather than whatever the hell it was that early American teens did with their time. Tending fields and tipping cows I guess. The style of his speechcraft (if that's not a word, I'm making him so) is alarmingly accurate to the period and his look as he ages only improves.

I never saw the movie Lincoln, but this frame tells me I might as well have.

So yes, there are rough patches in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In fact, this movie could be sold at Bath & Body Works as an exfoliant. But it rather makes up for them with a masterful sense of style and horror movie fun that makes it a uniquely strange thrill ride. It's not going to rewrite cinema history, but this buoyant look back over America's alternate past is worth visiting for fans of vampires, exuberant action, or hot presidents.

More like BABE Lincoln, amirite?

TL;DR: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a little too reliant on its source material, but is a wacky fun retelling of a historical turning point.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 898

M Is For Music Of The Night

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge is another new release. You guys are so lucky I had enough money to actually review two new films this month! Maybe I should include a tip jar on the sidebar...

Year: 2014

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Horror in 2014 is certainly shaping up to be better than that bland, uneven slate of studio horror we were trapped with last year. I had to chew off my own leg just to make it through to Christmas. Luckily, Only Lovers Left Alive, the new film from the director of nothing you've ever heard of, Jim Jarmusch, is an intriguingly fresh take on the notoriously haphazard vampire genre.

It really changes your perspective on Tom Hiddleston. I mean... vampires. Or whatever.

The film follows Adam (Hiddleston), a mopey and reclusive rocker vampire in Detroit, and Eve (Tilda Swinton), his wife of many (many) years, who has taken up residence in Tangiers. You might expect this situation to be a result of marital strife, but you would be wrong. In fact, nearly all expectations one might typically have for a film like this turn out to be wrong.

There's no fighting wars with sunlight, crosses, and garlic. There's no evil tribe of vampires or mystical demon queen bent on world domination. There's hardly any conflict to speak of, actually. More Breathless than Dracula, the film depicts a few days in the life of a vampire couple, exploring the nature of a relationship that has weathered the tests of centuries.

Only Lovers Left Alive is also characterized by a quiet sense of humor that doesn't seek to announce itself. Bright and clever, with only one joke that is beaten into the ground too often to have much merit, the film is a curious genre-bending piece that never quite falls into a categorizable camp, which is much to its benefit.

The film simply exists, defying explanation. Much like Tilda Swinton's cheekbones.

The entire value of the thing relies intrinsically on the acting chops of its core couple and the Swinton-Hiddleston duo deliver like never before, turning in a pair of performances like nothing the world of vampires has ever seen before. Although Hiddleston displays some traces of Rice-ian vampire angst, there is never a second that these two aren't convincingly ancient and utterly in love with each other. 

Their effortless chemistry is something I would never have expected from these two actors but by the end of the first ten minutes, you can feel it in your bones and question why you ever doubted it.

Swinton steals the show with a marvelous performance as a woman who has rode out millennia, seeing the worst that humanity has to offer but still ceaselessly finding the joy in life. Her lusty appreciation for the world around her is what compels her to live and keeps Adam away from his darker tendencies.

At its heart, this isn't a story about vampires, but about two philosophies and worldviews duking it out on the battlefields of love. That sounds hokey as all get out, but the film is rather rich in thematic material on the nature of what it means to be alive and to be human. There's a reason Adam calls the un-vamped denizens of the city "zombies" and it's not entirely ironic.

Leave it to the undead to know more about life than we ever will.

The real strength of the film is in its world building, something which frequent followers of this blog will know I have a dangerously overwhelming passion for. But there's just something about investigating the nooks and crannies of an alternate universe that gets me all tingly inside.

This film is full of well-thought out explorations of what unending life would be like and how different personality types would handle it. Add in a dash of old souls needing to adapt to the changing times (and with the amount of contaminated blood on the rise thanks to our dumb human antics, it's a real necessity) and you get a deliciously rich cocktail of pure cinema.

Although occasionally the film bogs itself down in the mire of stuffy "art" filmmaking (it's these points that lost me) like the nauseating opening shot or some of the longer musical interludes, the favoring of intellectual meat over conflict or even literal meat is utterly unique in a film of this type.

All in all, it's perhaps more moody than I care for, but it's a terrific film that blows most of the crappy vamp films we've been dumping into theaters since the 90's out of the water.

TL;DR: Only Lovers Left Alive is a slow-moving, conflict less film that is a valuable exploration into human nature guided by a pair of terrific performances.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This Movie? I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd seek out to view this movie again, but I feel that I am a better horror fan for having watched it.

Word Count: 848

Modern Vampire of the City

Year: 2011

Director: Craig Gillespie

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tennant

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Full disclosure: I have not seen the 1985 Tom Holland vampire flick on which 2011's Fright Night is based. So I can neither extoll its virtues as a glorious remake nor detract it as a pale shadow of its ancestor's glory.

I have no idea of the quality of the original, but I'll say my opinion on the 2011 iteration couldn't be downgraded easily - the film's much too dazzling for that. Fright Night 2011 is one in a long line of modern age remakes of classic 80's horror films and one of the few to accomplish what the remakes of that period (Carpenter's The Thing, Cronenberg's The Fly, The Blob) tended to do regularly - capture the tone and magic of the original film while updating it for the modern world.

Fright Night is endlessly fun and immediately earns a spot in my top five remakes of the century. Although, to be fair, my Top Five Remakes Awards Shelf currently contains Fright Night, Evil Dead, Wizard of Gore, some dead flies, lint, and a Post-It Note that reads "NOT Prom Night."

And a collage of "Colin Farrell shirtless" Google Image results.

High school student Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) has risen in popularity due to another generous gift from the Puberty Fairy, leaving his geeky old friends Adam (Will Denton) and Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse and is there a film in the front half of this decade that doesn't have this guy in it?) behind in the dust. Why would he hang out with them when he can make out with his way-out-of-his-league girlfriend Amy (the hilariously named Imogen Poots) or her douchey friend Mark (Dave Franco)?

Sidebar: Amy is the worst. She doesn't want to go to prom cuz that's lame (I'm thinking she'll regret the decision to be too cool for prom fifteen years from now) and she forces him to buy her smoothies. 0/10. Would not recommend.

He lives in a cookie cutter Las Vegas suburb with his realtor single mom (Toni Collette, who has been playing this part since about the time Hollywood was invented). Business has been tough though, because of all those families in the neighborhood that keep moving out mysteriously without warning. And what's going on with that weird neighbor who only comes out when the sun goes down?

It takes about 30 seconds for Ed to warn Charley that Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire and oh hey, maybe don't let your mom invite him inside.

The real horror is not being allowed to let this carefully unbuttoned man into your home.

Already the plot is moving at a fast clip (take into consideration that it took Bella Swan about an hour to figure out that Edward was a vampire - in a movie completely predicated on this plot point) and Fright Night sprints full pelt through a variety of delectable vampire setpieces as Jerry slinks around stalking his prey, as sly and calm as a jungle cat.

David Tennant plays Russell Brand Peter Vincent, a Las Vegas magician and master of vampire lore who is contacted by Charley to help maybe vanquish the guy who's been killing all his neighbors. But all is not as it seems and Vincent is as cowardly as they come, refusing to go anywhere near him. This is wise, especially considering that he's landed himself in the one remake that's actually pretty consistently scary.

Left to his own devices, Charley must find a way to destroy Jerry and somehow avoid looking like a complete psycho in the process. This leads to a variety of awkward teen situations ("What are you working on?" "...Porn") and the sudden realization that not only is this movie pretty scary. It's funny.

I'm talking actual laughing out loud intentionally funny jokes. Jokes that land! In fact, at least three moments are among the funniest scenes I've ever witnessed in any horror-comedy film (see: Ed falling in the pool and Charley's escape attempt with Doris). And one look at the credits would reveal who else but Marti Noxon behind the pen, one of the key women behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

With a goddess of the craft in her element, a barrage of bloody vampire mayhem, and irrationally solid comic performances across the board, Fright Night is an undeniable success.

It really bites. ...You know. In a good way.

That came out wrong. I meant to say it sucks.

Screw it! It's good.

Imbuing the explosive excess of the 80's (Literally - things explode left and right here. People, houses, you name it.) with modern sarcasm, references to Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, and an unusually well-integrated use of modern iTechnology, Fright Night is a wonderful marriage of two decades of awesomeness.

With an utmost dedication to gleeful pandemonium and a balls-to-the-wall outrageous Third Act chase scene, the film overcomes even the nacho cheesiness of the 3D effects. Did I mention it's in 3D? How could it not be? Although I didn't watch it in three dimensions, which greatly hampers the overall effect of some of the more CGI-based moments.

Alongside the action and gore, the sound design works triple time in a uniquely exaggerated register that is absolutely inspiring. Not many films would be able to stand under the weight of the almost grotesquely comical sound effects (Dave Franco swinging his fist sounds like a freight train) but the film is funny enough all around to sustain and benefit greatly from it.

And although, like most 3D films, the cinematographer is mostly held at bay by the necessities of adding a whole dimension (Altering the basic properties of quantum mechanics is hard, OK?) but one shot - an elevator going down with the sun - is imbued with all the beauty the film could muster.

Kind of like Colin Farrell.

All around it's a great film that doesn't take itself seriously and allows the scary moments to bubble up naturally from within the silly scenes instead of laying them atop them like oil on water. Not for no reason is this film one of the highest rated remakes on Rotten Tomatoes (although we shouldn't necessarily trust them considering that they don't ask for my opinion)

Even if you're not a fan of horror (or perhaps especially if you're not a fan of horror), I urge you to check out this cotton candy gem. It has crazy vampire teeth, a quippy hero, Doctor Who, explosions, and even a twist ending that gets revealed in the final scene! The twist ending being that Anton Yelchin is secretly the hottest member of the cast.

Who could have guessed?

TL;DR: Fright Night is a remake that I'm absolutely not ashamed to admit is pretty fantastic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1147
Reviews In This Series
Fright Night (Holland, 1985)
Fright Night (Gillespie, 2011)