In the giddy aftermath of falling in love with the New World, I watched fourteen Colin Farrell films. I hated or actively disliked ten of those, although I sometimes found myself enjoying his performances whilst he swam against the bilgewater tide. My personal line on Farrell is that I prefer him playing comedy (In Bruges) or an everyman (Ondine, although I can't in good conscience endorse the film as a whole) as opposed to yuppie or studmuffin. That said, he's smokin' hot as the deadly power-vamp in Fright Night and I notice I don't particularly mind. He can also be very funny, which may be what makes all the difference. (When attacked with a crossbow by a man whose parents he killed years before: "You've got your mother's eyes. And your father's aim.") Add Anton Yelchin as the boy-next-door looking to find his way into manhood, throw in David Tennant (who may be one of my favorite humans on the planet, and I don't know why, exactly; that's the kind of sinewy charisma he commands) as a yellow-bellied vampire-slayer, and you've got yourself a party.
The original Fright Night emerged in the pre-Buffy, pre-Twilight eighties, and it marked a crucial moment in the history of the vampire film, bringing one taloned foot into comic banter and the other into modern teenage rite-of-passage. As such, we might do it homage as a big grandaddy to the vampire artform as we know and love it today. Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is the greater film, no question, but perhaps FN made more difference, in the end.
In this remake, Buffy the Vampire Slayer magister Marti Noxon gives us a script which bows to the spirit of the original while making vast improvements. Gone is the tired "your girlfriend looks just like my first love before I was turned" plot-device. In this one, as an early victim points out, there is nothing soulful or romantic about the killer: "He's like a shark. He feeds then moves on." As such, he is an apt metaphor for a certain kind of predatory player who feeds on the sex and heartblood of his women before turning his gaze cruelly and inexorably away.
You could launch a successful TV series from this movie. It has much to recommend it, and veins of gold to be mined. I like that the "everyone thinks I'm crazy but I know that guy's a vampire" bit doesn't get too far over-stretched. By about the halfway point everyone important recognizes the monster as such, and from there on out it's all about how to get that stake angled properly through that chest-space. I like that it's extraordinarily difficult for the hero and heroine to kill even a newborn vampire, who, true to Buffy-roots, keeps up the wisecracking until the pointy end. I like that it's set in Vegas, grown-up Disneyland to drifters and nighthawks, a place where daytime can be easily circumvented. I like that a nightclub is openly recognized not as a place of safety in numbers, but of dangerous anonymity wherein the most awful crimes might be ignored in a crowd of lotus-eaters over-steeped in the opiates of their various pleasures. I like that there is a vast, implied mythology behind the vampires' history: we find out that Farrell's Jerry ("That's a terrible vampire name, Jerry.") comes of a particular and ancient Mediterranean strain of beast, one with proliclivities towards colony-living and slow-feeding on living victims over days or weeks. "Snackers," a character scorns.
The characters are likable, the end-battle is satisfying, the metaphors are appropriate. There are great images: the vampire-slayer stuck in his panic room with a writhing, undead arm, or Jerry coolly setting a cross aflame with a touch, then extinguishing it with a breath.
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