Fright Night (2011)

“You’ve been watching me, I’ve been watching you. It seems fair.”

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Sometimes you want a little brainless fun in your horror movies. That’s exactly what I got from this 2011 remake of the 80s Fright Night.

The DVD has been grinning at me stupidly for months and waiting for its chance.

The time finally came late one night after our annual trip to Munster, Ontario’s Saunders Farm. After being chased by hockey mask-wearing, chain-saw wielding maniacs on the Haunted Hayride, I was keen to keep the silly horror coming.

With the kids safely upstairs doing “Jersey Shore” makeovers on one another (don’t ask), Fright Night and I could finally be together.

Watching something like Fright Night reminds my why foul-mouthed, hard-living Colin Farrell gets to keep on being a movie star. He’s monstrously charismatic as Jerry the vampire who lives next door in a boring little bedroom community outside of Las Vegas.

Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) is equally as effective as the wide-eyed, clueless and eventually, frantic teen, trying to prevent his mom played by Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding) from being taken in by Colin Farrell in a wife-beater. (And you know that’s a pretty reasonable trap for the average suburban housewife).

Fright Night brings the horror and humour. Humour like the recurring joke every time hapless Charley complains his neighbour is a vampire, people intone, “a vampire named Jerry? …That is a terrible vampire name, Jerry?” Perfect.

Horror when Jerry brings a date home to his basement dungeon. Good thing Jerry’s got a reasonable basement drainage system.

Charley’s lovely girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots) is confused by Charley’s lack of interest in making out in favour of staring at Colin Farrell wandering around his yard in a wife-beater. Also Charley seems to have taken up whittling stakes.

Add a Criss Angel-alike in the form of Peter Vincent (David Tennant) who has amassed a vampire slayer museum of sorts in his Las Vegas hotel suite, and you’ve got a campy vampire slasher flick that will scratch your Halloween itch on a frosty October evening every night of the week.

There’s a little bit of Rear Window by way of Disturbia mixed in with Lost Boys in Fright Night. Criterion quality coming of age tale this is not. But if you like watching Colin Farrell tearing up the scenery with his flashing white incisors, this is your movie.

I will leave you with Charley’s friend Ed’s (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) excellent character synopsis of the vampire Jerry, and a sample of the funny that is Fright Night:

“He’s a real monster and he’s not brooding, or lovesick, or noble. He’s the fucking shark from Jaws. He kills, he feeds, and he doesn’t stop until everybody around him is dead. And I seriously am so angry you think I read Twilight.”

* * * *

106 minutes

Rated R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references