“You deserve to die, boy.”
Roger Ebert once wrote: “Say ‘Dracula’ and you smile. Say ‘Nosferatu’ and you’ve bitten into a lemon.” In the 1980s, there was a concerted effort in American film to strip any sense of fun or romance from the vampire genre. Look at Near Dark, The Lost Boys, The Keep, and Fright Night. While all of those films are of varying quality, with Near Dark being arguably the best, Fright Night holds its own in a lot of ways. Granted, for an ostensible “horror comedy,” it’s not very funny, but it’s sexy enough to make up for that. Most of the performances are solid, and the practical effects are incredible. There’s just one huge, almost unforgivable flaw that makes the movie hard to watch, which is a shame, because other than that it’s a lot of fun.
Fright Night does itself a favor by not wasting any time with setup. Charlie is making out with his girlfriend, Amy, who is finally ready to have sex. He’s too preoccupied with looking out the window at some men bringing in what looks like a coffin. Who movies in at night, and with such strange cargo? Readers, we’re in scene one and Fright Night has already established that it’s about a vampire moving in next door to Charlie. If you’re looking for economical storytelling, you can stop looking here. After being too distracted for sex, Amy storms out on Charlie. I hope you like this trope, too, because it happens about three times in Fright Night.
Of course, with our hero convinced right away that he’s living next to the undead, the next big hurdle for him is to convince anyone that he’s not crazy. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Amy doesn’t believe him, and is still mad (Amy has two settings: mad at Charlie and crazy about Charlie). His mom is also a dead end – she’s more excited about a hopefully handsome bachelor moving in next door – so Charlie has to go to his best friend, Evil Ed, which is where Fright Night becomes nigh-unwatchable.
Evil Ed is the worst goddamn character I’ve seen in years. On paper he might be fine, but, perhaps due to a lost bet or a monkey’s paw situation, director Tom Holland (not Spider-Man) cast Stephen Geoffreys, and in doing so almost single-handedly sabotaged his own film. Geoffreys is incapable of delivering a line without giggling, and the laughter is never played as a nervous tic or a response to stress. Scene after scene, he is almost unable to make it through any of his lines, or interactions with other characters, without reminding us that he’s getting paid to play make-pretend. Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz kept straighter faces when they were on SNL. Also, he has the objectively awesome nickname Evil Ed, but gets incredibly mad whenever someone calls him “Evil.” It’s a pleasure to watch this little pain in the ass die. I hated this character so much it almost made me turn off the movie and write about it sight unseen.
Elsewhere, things are less dire. William Ragsdale, as Charlie, gives a pretty solid performance that has you rooting for him. He realizes that his friends don’t believe him, but he doesn’t let that faze him. He teams up with an old B-movie actor, Peter Vincent, played by Roddy McDowell in the film’s most affecting performance. He mines actual pathos out of a character who could just have been a joke, and when he admits to Charlie that he’s terrified, you want to grab his hand as Charlie does and keep him safe.
Fright Night belongs to Chris Sarandon, though. He plays the vampire in question, Jerry Dandridge (the movie’s best, unsung, joke is the idea of a vampire with the commonplace name of Jerry Dandridge). He brings equal amounts of charm and menace to the role, as if he’s auditioning for what would become his most famous role, that of Prince Humpderdinck in The Princess Bride. No matter how familiar you are with Sarandon as a comedic actor, that goes out the window once he started matter-of-factly threatening Charlie and his friends. After Charlie’s mother invites Jerry over for a drink, Jerry taunts Charlie: “Did you think I was waiting to come over until I was invited?”
There’s some unnecessary convoluted mythology at play, which is likely a result of Fright Night being about ten minutes too long. Jerry has a painting of (who we assume is) an ancient love of his, and she looks just like Amy. This is never fully explored, other than Jerry telling Amy that the painting is of someone he knew a long time ago. Maybe Holland (who also wrote) thought he was venturing too deeply into Dracula territory and dropped the subplot. The climactic battle drags on, too. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but when a sequence that relies on tension exhausts itself, the resultant lulls are hard to come back from.
But that’s a minor quibble, because the protracted finale lets us really get a good look at Ken Diaz’s masterful makeup creations. Before I checked, I assume Rick Baker or Tom Savini was responsible for the ghoulish undead looks, they’re that good. These vampires are ugly: their skin is mottled and gray, their fangs point in all directions, their eyes are a sickly shade of yellow. Even when Jerry turns into a bat, it looks less like an actual bat than one of Rob Bottin’s creations for The Thing. So, yes, the finale drags on, but it’s hard to complain about it all that much.
Fright Night is a bit of a mixed bag. The good parts – Sarandon’s performance, Diaz’s makeup effects – have aged terrifically, and make for a genuinely compelling watching experience. The bad parts…well, that’s mostly Evil Ed, who I hate more than I hate physical pain. If you can get past that – or maybe view in the vein of obnoxious ’80s side characters, like Robert Downey Jr. in Back to School or Bill Paxton in Weird Science – then you’ll have a lot of fun with this. Hell, you might have fun anyway. I did.
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