I want to say great things about Craig Gillespie’s remake of Fright Night. I want to say that it was worth seeing and it was full of awesome moments. I also wanted to be able to write this review without making so many comparisons to the 1985 Original by Tom Holland. Not that the original was a masterpiece by any means, but I dozed off (just a little) on this film.

If there’s only one reason I could give for recommending Fright Night, it would be to get a taste of what Vampires should be. Don’t read me wrong on this. I own all four Twilight books in hardcover, read them repeatedly, and have seen the three films that came out in the theatre. It’s just nice to see a vampire movie that shows vampires more as predatory creatures than sparkling A&F models.  There’s an edge to this film that’s pretty fun in a lot of ways. Both Colin Farrell and David Tennant have great roles here and even Anton Yelchin holds his own, but there’s a weird breakdown that happens. Fright Night is a good film, as long as you don’t try to make any kind of direct comparisons to the source material.

The story focuses on Charlie Brewster (Yelchin), a teenager – the story being in Vegas this time –  who discovers he has a vampire named Jerry Dandrige (Farrell) living next door to him. When the vampire confronts Charlie, Charlie is forced to seek out help in the form of Peter Vincent (Tennant) to defeat him. While there were a few scenes that really stood out for me and I found myself smiling more often than rolling my eyes, the pacing of this was off. Other audiences may find that the movie moved well. I felt like they were just throwing things to say “Well, wouldn’t it be cool if they did this, and then that.”

The two problems I had with Fright Night were it’s pacing and Chris Mintz-Plasse. Chris is fun to watch at the start, and I’d love to see him do more, but someone really has to give him something where he’s not playing the “token geek”.  While I liked the movie overall, there’s a lot of verbal exposition in the beginning of the film, as Charlie doesn’t so much discover the truth about Jerry, but is pretty much told the entire scenario he’s in about 15 minutes into the start. I had a problem with that. Again, depending on the audience, the movie may move just fine.

Fright Night is one of those films could be a love it or hate it. I’m of the audience that will probably catch it again when it’s out on video, but it doesn’t feel like anything you really have to rush to the theatre for.