Fright Night

Oh man. I really do not know how I feel about Fright Night. A remake of the 1985 film of the same name, it's a big-budget horror/adventure movie starring a bunch of actors I like (Anton Yelchin, David Tennant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) that should have been something I really enjoyed. Instead, it almost perfectly weighs its good and bad elements into a movie that should be the textbook definition of a mediocre movie.

First, the good stuff: in the land of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, it's nice to see vampires as being scary and evil again. Colin Farrell plays the movie's villain, a vampire named Jerry that preys on the population of Las Vegas while living in a suburb next door to high school student Charley Brewster (Yelchin) and his single mother (Toni Collette). After his buddy Ed (Mintz-Plasse) notices the disappearances, they must battle Jerry with the help of famed vampire enthusiast and Vegas showman Peter Vincent (Tennant). Adventure, pitfall, plenty of old-school vampire lore. Yelchin is a likable hero, and David Tennant steals every scene he has as the self-absorbed magician.

Now we must address the bad: namely, the fact that, despite all of the great ingredients listed above, it still doesn't sit quite right. Mainly, it's because the characters, despite being cast well, are not nearly as detailed as they should have been. They felt more like slapped-together caricatures of standard horror movie archetypes. You had the angry nerd, the hot girlfriend, the lonely single mom, the arrogant alcoholic celebrity, and the good, rounded protagonist that just wants to be normal. This is fine when you're creating characters that are going to be killed off quickly, but all of these characters stick around for most of the movie, and a little character development would have gone a long way in making the movie feel less two-dimensional (Yes, this was released in 3d. No, that wasn't a pun.)

Fright Night was worth the $1.20 I paid to watch it. Had I paid anything more for it, I probably would've felt cheated. In keeping with its perfect mediocrity, I give it a perfectly mediocre score. 5 wooden stakes out of 10.