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Review: Fright Night

By: Sean Collado

Neighborhood Watch programs are designed to have neighbors in a community watch for strange people that may be in the neighborhood and report them to the local police. Unfortunately, a majority of neighborhoods in America don’t have this system applied.

One such neighborhood is a small one near the city of Las Vegas, where Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) lives. To make matters worse for Charlie, his new neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) turns out to be a vampire. This is Fright Night, the remake directed by Craig Gillespie.

Once Jerry moves into the neighborhood, people start to disappear. When Charley’s ex-friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) disappears after trying to warn Charley about Jerry, then Charley becomes suspicious. Once he discovers the truth, Charley has to take matters in his own hands to save his mother (Toni Collette) and his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots).

This film looks fun and it is. It’s fun for maybe two showings overall. When the trailers first came out for this film, it looked to be 10 to 15% comedy and 90 to 85% horror. In reality, it’s 40% comedy with only 60% horror in the film. While the modern style of comedy makes this a fun film, it doesn’t really scream out as a traditional horror film until it actually comes time for the suspenseful and scary portions of the film. The film seems to rely on the modern comedy in order to please the younger viewers of this generation.

As far as acting choices go, I wasn’t aware that Jerry was actually played by Colin Farrell until the end credits came up; he played a very convincing modern-day vampire. Although the concept of a vampire needing an invitation into someone’s house is new to me, it seemed like it was over-stated through Farrell’s mannerisms during one of his early conversations with the Charley character. Yelchin is in his acting element when it comes to suspense moments as he’s able to create a believable character. David Tennant, who plays Peter Vincent, was another good pick for this film because he’s able to act like an ass one minute, a scaredy cat the next, and finally a wannabe monster hunter. While Christopher Mintz excels at being a comedian, there was really no point in putting a “McLovin” character into this film. Imogen is nothing more than a pretty face in this film and Toni’s part just isn’t that strong, even for a minor character.

Watching this for the first time will be fun. Seeing it again is debateable, but maybe audiences can stand watching it one more time if not two. In the end, Fright Night gets 3 out of 5 stars for being fun the first time, but not really worth watching over and over again.

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