Fright Night Released 2 September 2011 Director Craig Gillespie Starring Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, Toni Collette Writer(s) Marti Noxon Producer(s) Michael De Luca, Michael J. Gaeta, Alison R. Rosenzweig Origin United Kingdom, United States Running Time 105 minutes Genre Comedy, horror Rating 15A

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A Frightful Bore!

One of the few joys of growing up in the eighties was the arrival of VHS videos. In the early days, before the likes of Xtra-vision took hold of the market, most video rental outlets were small operations. Sure, you could get the big hits of the day, but you were just as likely to rent some American B-movie. Most of these were utter dross but you came across the occasional gem and the original Fright Night was just such a film. Tom Holland’s 1985 original starred William Ragsdale, Roddy McDowell and Chris Sarandon and will be remembered fondly by those who saw it.

So, as part of Hollywood’s campaign to remake every film that was ever made, Fright Night gets its chance to be redone with a very starry cast. Anton Yelchin, of Star Trek and Terminator Salvation fame, takes the lead as Charley Brewster. He’s a bit of a geek, but he’s found himself punching above his weight to be dating the beautiful Amy (Imogen Poots). However his new status as a “cool kid” is threatened by his former best friend and uber-nerd ‘Evil’ Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). A friend of theirs is missing and Ed is convinced a vampire has killed him. He contends that the vampire is Jerry (Colin Farrell) who has just moved in next door to Charley. Charley dismisses Ed’s allegations as nonsense but finds out it’s true soon enough after Ed is attacked by Jerry and turned into a vampire himself. Charley is concerned for both Amy and his mother (Toni Collette) so he goes for help to a Las Vegas magician Peter Vincent (David Tennant) who specialises in the occult. Vincent turns out to be a cowardly fraud though and Charley is up against it trying to keep everyone safe from Jerry.

Craig Gillespie, who directed the sweet, low-key Lars And The Real Girl seems a strange choice for this project. Perhaps the studio thought he’d bring some indie credibility with him but he seems to have gotten lost in the mix. Instead the tone of the film is set by Marti Noxon’s script. As she’s a former writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s no wonder that this feels more like a cheap knock-off of that TV show.

These days, we are inundated with vampires in film and TV, so at this stage the genre has pretty much been sucked dry (sorry!). This remake is a particularly charmless affair that goes through the motions but doesn’t have any spark about it. It has little of the humour that made the original so much fun and the big-name performers can do little with the leaden script.

Colin Farrell does his best as the vampire, but the character has none of the aristocratic charisma of Chris Sarandon in the original (Sarandon himself makes a cameo as one of his victims). Yelchin and Poots are watchable if slightly dull as the leads but did we really need another unlikely ‘babe in love with the geek’ storyline crowbarred in? Christopher Mintz-Plasse does his now trademark Superbad nerd thing as ‘Evil’ Ed, but has none of the wonderful weirdness that Stephen Geoffreys brought to the original role.

The biggest disappointment though is David Tennant, who simply isn’t a patch on Roddy McDowell’s Peter Vincent. Clearly they wanted Russell Brand for the role but couldn’t get him, so instead they got Tennant to play Russell Brand playing Peter Vincent. The result is Tennant, a fine actor, spending the whole film shouting and swearing in a cockney accent like that talentless buffoon Brand. It is a disastrously misjudged performance.

Another disaster is the 3-D that was obviously tacked on late in the production. We’ve grown used to poor 3-D, but in this it is truly abysmal and actually makes many of the scenes unwatchable, as they’re mostly set in dark rooms.

Overall, this is a big disappointment and newcomers to Fright Night would be better off skipping this and seeking out the original.

- Jim O’Connor