Review of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009) by Christine L — 09 Nov 2010

Hmm...the books that the movie is based on are really, really good. The movie was entertaining but not as good as the books. Too many plots were introduced (that don't actually appear in the books, or at least not til the 2nd half of the series) but not explored fully. The acting was okay, Chris Massoglia looks like Darren Shan, but I don't like his voice. I think the main problem is that they tried too hard to make the movie funny and scary, and the result was a mess. Mr Tiny is really scary in the books and doesn't appear very often, but in the movie he's just a weirdo.

However, overall I did enjoy watching the film. Adapting a book series into a movie is always difficult. More characters and plots have to be introduced to lead into the next movie (which makes the movie's ending feel unsatisfying), and plans for sequels are usually dropped. I don't think there will be a sequel to this movie, so I guess it's more of an expensive ad for the book series, rather than an introduction to a movie series.