Fright Night 2011

[7.1/10] I miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is silly. For one thing, the show isn’t gone. It’s readily available on home video, and streaming services, and beaucoup YouTube supercuts of its most dramatic and hilarious moments. For another, its influence has reverberated long since it went off the air, in everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to The Legend of Korra. But at its best, the show combined genre thrills and relatable adolescent problems, with a level of charm, ambition, and creativity unmatched by anything else.

So imagine my anticipation for Fright Night, a film featuring another teenage protagonist who fights vampires while dealing with his high school age problems, penned by Marti Noxon, a writer for Buffy who was the driving force behind one of the series’s best seasons. With talented ringers like Colin Farrell and David Tennant in the cast, and another vamp-killing adventure in the offing, what’s not to be excited about?

Fright Night makes good on that effort to balance between horror and high school tropes that Noxon and her colleagues perfected on Buffy. The basic plot of the film comes down to “it turns out my new neighbor is a vampire.” But beyond that, there’s an attempt at some real thematic exploration of the competing impulses of teenage boys.

That tension comes from the pull between childhood geekery -- the desire to be imaginative, to dress up and goof off, and eschew being cool in favor of being earnest -- and more adult desires. There’s a sense that those things have to be put aside for teenage boys, to be cool and grown-up and mature, in order to make good on all those hormones telling you to change whatever you have to about yourself in order to get (and bed) the girl.

While a little exploitative, blunt, and muddled at times, that’s the most laudable part of Fright Night. Amid the demon-fighting escapades, it centers on protagonist Charley Brewster’s embarrassment at his nerdy past, balanced with his anxiousness about being a man and consummating his relationship with his girlfriend, Amy. While it’s too much and too far to call Fright Night a cinematic referendum on toxic masculinity, it’s at least a tribute to the idea that there’s more than one form of masculinity, and gentler, geekier variations of it don’t need to be discarded in order to be grown-up or romantically viable.

That idea is exemplified by the film’s antagonist, the (amusingly) mundanely named “Jerry the vampire.” He’s played by Colin Farrell, so he’s already a walking symbol of traditional rugged manliness. And throughout the film, Jerry represents that sort of idea, literally and figuratively preying on women, taunting Charley after he’s hypnotized Amy in a “Mr. Steal Your Girl” sort of way, and all around playing on nerdly insecurities that some handsome bloke who fits the idealized image of what a man should be is going to come on top in the worlds of romance.

And while the film rushes into it, it puts Charley’s former friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, once again playing a live action Millhouse), offering resentments for the way he was cast aside, after he himself is taunted by Jerry in similar tones. There’s a commitment to that tug of war, inevitably resolved in favor of the well-meaning kid just being himself, that gives the film intrigue beyond its monster mash setup, even if the execution isn’t exactly flawless.

That’s good, because the storytelling is definitely not flawless. The one thing you can count from something plopped off the Buffy coaching tree is good texture. Fright Night has fun, knowing dialogue that stylized but still naturalistic enough to pass muster. There’s little quirks and twists on the vampire mythos that show Noxon and director Craig Gillespie having fun with their fangoria fantasy. And while he’s woefully underutilized, David Tennant is still crackling and hilarious in his drop-ins as Peter Vincent, the Criss Angel-like gothic magician who eventually helps Charley in his vampiric fight. There’s plenty of enjoyable stuff packed into the margins film, it’s just not wrapped around anything worth writing home about.

Fright Night more or less lurches into its story, and thumps around haphazardly from there, rolling from set piece to set piece without much setup or connective tissue. Characters are quickly introduced then dispatched, or sidelined for long stretches of the film, without enough shading to explain why they’re selectively skeptical or making important choices. And the film doesn't spend enough time establishing the rules of its supernatural world to take advantage of them for any dramatic effect,merely dropping plot-relevant details or convenient macguffins into the movie just before they’re deployed.

Fright Night is essentially hoping it can get by on the strength of its set pieces and the enjoyableness of that texture alone, and sometimes it can. There’s striking images of limbs emerging from walls or twists on wrong-monster weapons that are worth a good laugh and add dramatic tension.

But the film is hobbled by embarrassingly unconvincing CGI and special effects that lend a sense of chintziness rather than charm, and, I’m sorry to say, by Farrell’s performance, who never quite finds the middle ground between archness and camp to make his lynchpin villain click consistently. And while Anton Yelchin does fine enough work to give Charley an everyteen quality, there’s not enough flavor to the performance to cement that geeky-or-gallant internal conflict the film wants to draw out with its bloodsucker-bashing sequences.

Still, Fright Night makes for a suitable, big screen palliative for those still missing Buffy and company (or, I suppose, waiting for their recently announced reboot). The film has enough going for it to entertain you for a few hours, with a clever enough premise to keep you intrigued, a bit of interesting subtext to give it some weight, and a sufficient amount of texture to keep you smiling through the movie’s lumpiness. It’s no classic, but it’s enough to satisfy your vampire-slaying urges for an evening.