Review of Fright Night (1985) by Shane V — 24 Dec 2009

Charlie Brewster is your average kid. He's got a nice house in a nice neighborhood with a great mother, and a cute girlfriend to boot. But Charlie's life changes drastically when he sees a woman in his new neighbor's house, and she turns up dead the next day. And after seeing his new neighbor, a suave, debonair man, move a coffin into the house, Charlie has no choice but to assume he is now living next to a vampire.

This was a very interesting movie to watch. The acting is pretty decent most of the time, but in some circumstances it was just laughably awful. And the gore/horror scenes were so overdone, I almost mistook this movie for a parody. But there is a decent story behind all this madness. It's more dynamic than a typical vampire story. It really moves like the writer was someone who has seen a vampire movie, and gets all the ridiculous formalities out of the way to create a decent story. There isn't much comedy to laugh at (in my opinion) and one of the characters just annoyed me horribly. I said the horror and gore were WAY over done, and they are, but the special effects are surprisingly good for a 20-year-old movie. Is it scary? Not really, but it has a good creepy atmosphere. Not much in the vein of character diversity, but there is a good amount of character development (for a horror movie). The suspense is okay, but nothing really spectacular. Like the acting, the dialog moves back and forth from decent to just plain awful. So it was a pretty good vampire flick with some decent thrills. But it's also a roller coaster between good and bad with both the script and the acting. Both of which are drenched in cheese. It's got all the ingredients for a great vampire movie, but those lapses in quality keep the film down. So I give "Fright Night" 8 bite marks out of 10.