Fright Night sneak preview!

 

I got to go see a sneak preview of Fright Night last night, thanks to my friend Mike. Actually , I hadn’t planed on seeing this movie at all, but when he phoned up telling me we could get in to the preview for free…well I’m not going to pass that up.

 

I had low expectations here. See the thing is, I always felt Fright Night was a mentor student story – it’s Obi Wan and Luke. The relationship between Charlie and Peter Vincent is central to that plot, but from what I could tell in the trailers, Vincent is barely in the movie. I was expecting a simple rehash, with overused CGI, and little attention paid to what made the original good.

 

I have to say, I was surprised. The new Fright Night is a solid vampire movie. A good one even, with well done makeups and gore. The 3d element is okay, but you’re not missing much without it. At least it’s not as distracting as it was in Pirates. What impressed me the most was that the movie really felt like Fright night. The characters are all there, and played true to the originals. They’ve been updated to 21st century people, but are still instantly recognizable as Charlie, Ed, vincent and the rest. This isn’t a case of just taking the name for publicity value, they really DID remake Fright Night.

 

There are a few things missing. Peter vincent is absent for most of the movie as I feared. He dosen’t really show up untill the third act and that’s a pity because this version of Vincint is really fun. There’s a lot of interesting things goin on with him and it’s a shame they couldn’t have explored his backstory further. It almost feels like he was shoehorned in because they need to have the character for it to be Fright Night.

 

I seem to remember more humor in the original. There’s still a lot here, but it’s darker. This is far more of a horror movie than the original. It’s trying for a darker scarier tone, and it succeeds.

 

Finally, I miss the inovation the original showed. For a lot of people there’s a question of which do you like better? FN or THe Lost Boys? I choose the Lost Boys every time. But I’ll admit that for as much as I like the Lost Boys, the effects in it were very standard. Good, but nothing we hadn’t seen before. Fright Night on the other hand was one of those movies that had innovative effects and surprised us whith what they could create. There’s none of that in the remake. The effects are VERY good….but I’ve see it all elsewhere.

 

Still, this isn’t a negitive review. On it’s own, it’s a really good vampire movie. The look is very consitant with how Fright Night vampires looked in the past, but punched up a little better with the better FX available today. The vampires are MONSTERS. That’s refreshing. I don’t mind a romantic element to them as long as we never forget these things arn’t human. They don’t think or feel as humans do. It’s a diffrent existance (where I think, Twilight largely fails. On ther other hand those are less like vampires and more like simple immortals) and we get that in FN. The pace is good and the threat is amazing. IN Fright Night, just the one vampire is a HUGE, almost insurmountable threat. With films like Underworld or Priest, or Stakeland we’ve gotten used to seeing armies of the undead. It’s almost like one vampire has ceased to be a big deal, and movie studios think there needs to be hundreds of them before it’s a threat. In Fright Night it’s just one vampire and that’s terrifying because we can’t beat even that single individual…so when we hit the last 10 minuets or so of the movie and there’s a bunch of vamps….it’s like an armageddon level threat.

 

I really liked this. Part of me feels like I shouldn’t have, but I really did. It’s not a must-see, but if you have the evening free and feel like a scary movie hit Fright Night up.

Advertisement