Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 1985 Tom Holland film Fright Night. Today, he looks at the 2011 Craig Gillespie movie, Fright Night. This article will contain spoilers.
This was a legitimate surprise, even having good word of mouth going into it. Pretty ridiculous to have a remake better than the already-good original; kind of astounding to have a movie that is incredibly, perfectly 2011 America — the credits music is a bluegrass cover of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, to give you a taste of what that truly means — while actually being fun and enjoyable.
It helps that the cast is unbelievably stacked. Sorry to Gary from Justified, but Anton Yelchin (rest in peace) is an incredible step up in the leading man department as Charley, David Tennant’s scumbag Vegas magician blows the fuddy-duddy Peter Vincent from the first film out of the water, and even the role of Jerry Dandrige, which Chris Sarandon really owned and defined for the 1985 film, is now being played by Colin Farrell, which is almost unfair. The biggest gains to the cast aren’t the headliners, however; the biggest gains in the film are in the way the supporting roles leap up in wattage. Amy is played by Imogen Poots doing her best quirky Sarah Chalke-in-Scrubs impression; a script interested in subverting contemporary teen sex comedy beats rather than reinforcing them gives her so much more to work with than her predecessor. This time around, Mom is played by Toni Collette, who is always a delight, and also given much more to work with than the 1985 version of the character got (and at least a much more heroic reason for arbitrarily vanishing from the movie than “started working nights”). By far the biggest improvement, however, is to the character of Evil, now blessedly just Ed, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who readers of a certain age will know better as McLovin. Getting anyone in there at all who can act is an upgrade, but Mintz-Plasse navigates the “doomed Cassandra vampire nerd turned gleeful spree killer” arc perfectly and with compelling humor throughout. Yeah, it’s basically the same as the comedic performances he does in his other roles, if a bit more bitter and dejected, but those roles are good and I’m glad to see more of that performance.
It’s a remake so the plot is basically the same and we don’t need to go through it blow-by-blow. The topline summary is: Jerry Dracula moves in next door, leers at a single mom, Ed and Charley investigate, Jerry reveals himself to the boys, Ed gets got (the order here is slightly different with Ed getting turned earlier in the film, but he gets a more satisfying comeback), Charley looks for help from Peter Vincent and is spurned, Jerry decides it’s time to stop playing cat and mouse and goes loud, everyone scrambles, Ed returns as a secondary big bad and gets killed by Charley (in the first film it was Peter), Jerry grabs Amy in the nightclub, Charley and Peter steel themselves for the final showdown to save Amy and kill Jerry Dracula in the basement. Not a substantially different movie on paper from the 1985 film; the biggest difference is the elimination of Billy Cole, the Renfield of the first film, and it both fits the new Jerry much better as a character not to have a life partner buddy and doesn’t affect the plot in the slightest. How they get to these beats and how the performers hit them is the difference maker.
Farrell, for instance, updates Sarandon’s evil step-dad Jerry Dandrige into an appropriately 2000s scumbag gutter misogynist. He still preys on sex workers and lonely women, he still sees Charley’s mom and girlfriends as targets, but there’s no nice getting to know you with the mom and there’s no scene where he tells his bestie that Amy looks just like his lost love from the past. He’s just a violent shithead with appetites. It’s important that Farrell is using his American accent here, even though I usually feel that’s the wrong choice for him; his natural Irish accent is both too out of place for a semi-concealed predator and, frankly, too charming for the vicious brutal insect-man he’s playing. The “step-dadding” that occurs in this movie is limited to him smirking as he tells Charley, in the mode of an older role model giving advice to a younger man, that women like his mother and Amy need to be “managed,” because they’re “ripe” and targets for other men in the world. Just look at them, he says. He needs to grow up and be a man, because “there are a lot of bad people out there.” By this point in the conversation, both of them know precisely what they’re actually talking about. Charley’s getting Jerry some beers from his mom’s fridge, allegedly so the vampire can share them with a woman he’s about to have over, while Jerry stands just over the threshold of the door to the backyard, all but demanding Charley invite him in, and Charley won’t do it. The next time Jerry tries to get into the house, he’s done asking: He goes to the backyard, tears the gas line out of the ground, and lights it up, blowing half of Charley’s house apart. Jerry knows his rules; Ed discovered earlier that vampires don’t have to ask permission to enter an abandoned house. He doesn’t have to ask for permission if metaphysically it’s not a house anymore, either. There’s actually an interesting Platonic question there about the form of a “house,” but the film is more interested in our heroes fleeing to Vegas.
The setting of the 2011 Fright Night is indeed Las Vegas and its outlying suburbs; that cheap, pre-fab Americana built in the desert and made to last maybe 30 years before the houses are no longer fit for purpose. The setting reflects the tone of the parts of the movie that happen there: Obviously doomed and having a good time not thinking about it. The best sequence in the film is probably the terrified flight from that suburbia and its constant for sale signs to the Vegas Strip; it’s where Farrell’s Jerry finally takes the human face all the way off and reveals the grinning bug inside of him. On the Dracula to Nosferatu scale, both Fright Night Dandriges are kind of tweeners: They look like draculas, but when you really get them going and make them actually show themselves, they’re nosferatus under there; just twitching balls of appetite. Farrell’s physical acting in the movie is very good at conveying this — even when his higher-order brain is still working, his eyes are darting around any room he’s in; he’s reaching out and touching things to establish where boundaries are and what space he can and can’t move through; he’s forgetting to smile and then remembering again in an instant. But on the road he’s free to just be the monster, getting run down and dragged under Mom’s crossover SUV, forcing a stop by clawing up through the bottom of the car, face cracking apart and unhinging as he kills a man who had the misfortune to rear-end the stopped vehicle on the lonely highway in the dark and get out to complain. When Mom gets him almost-but-not-quite through the heart from behind with a Century 21 realty sign (incredible product placement), he screeches and skitters off like a lower order insect. Mom then faints and hits her head on the sidewalk and is out for the rest of the movie, which, well, it’s a better way of moving her offstage than in the 1985 film.
Peter Vincent was perhaps the weakest part of the first film and while David Tennant salvages the role in the sense that now every time Vincent is onscreen, you’re getting to see David Tennant doing David Tennant things mostly shirtless and in eyeliner, the role is still more or less an excuse to add a series of props to the proceedings: Battle axes, six shooters, chalices filled with holy water, a magical stake that will turn the victims of the vampire it kills human again (yes, you know where this one’s ending up). Vincent himself has been reimagined as a Vegas stage magician, a shameless Criss Angel knockoff except Tennant isn’t asked to do an American accent. His motivations for “not believing in vampires” despite having a giant collection of occult memorabilia dedicated to killing them are a bit convenient for the plot; first he insists he doesn’t believe in vampires to get Charley to go home for the attack on his house, then when the heroes appear on his doorstep a second time he reveals that alright, he does believe in them but they’re on their own. Once Amy gets taken he finally gets his story around to “a vampire killed my parents and I’m a coward,” and it turns out that this is in fact the same vampire — there’s a gesture here to a wider lore that the film doesn’t need; Jerry Dandrige is apparently one of the “Mediterranean tribe” of vampires. Sure. For a guy who gets in a dig on Charley and Amy by calling them the “Scooby squad,” his parts of the film sure are the ones that end up the most Buffy-like. In the end of course he mans up and joins Charley on the final attack run.
The end is fun; we’re doing a lot less Girl Becoming A Woman stuff with Amy here as these “high schoolers” are even more obviously in their early to mid-twenties than the gang in the 1985 film, and so we just get sexy vampire nonsense. Removing the Renfield role was the right call — without him as an additional five minutes or what have you of fighting, the climax runs a lot more smoothly. Obviously in the end Charley saves the day by staking the vamp, though it’s an amusing twist that he gets in position to do it by setting himself on fire first and tackling the monster, riding him kind of like a rodeo bull until they end up in a sunbeam from the breaking dawn, leaving the vampire open to the lethal blow. Everyone making this movie knew what it was when they put it together; the final scene is our guy and girl finally getting down to it in Vincent’s Vegas penthouse, and unlike in the 1985 film, there’s no final jump scare or sequel hook. 2011 is thankfully too early for any post-credits nonsense.
Despite some missteps that date the script — we get a couple gay jokes, but we’re thankfully far enough in the timeline that outright slurs aren’t acceptable; there’s some jock/nerd stuff that was kind of barely legible by 2011 but seems to know it in how the hot girls and the jock bullies both undermine it; in addition to that shot at Buffy, Charley and Ed make cracks about Twilight by name, which sort of has an air of desperation to it — it’s very solidly written and directed, and has some great performances, and is worth your time to track down even if the previous version of the film didn’t grab you. Very much regret that we never got to see what the rest of Yelchin’s career would look like; very happy that Farrell is now doing a lot of roles like this instead of the leading man stuff that rarely landed.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
