The good
thing for this movie 'Fright Night 2' is that I'd probably pay
good money to watch actress Jamie Murray fold her
laundry. The not so good thing for this movie 'Fright
Night 2' is that I'd almost rather see Ms. Murray fold her
laundry than watch this movie again. Sad... but true.
Just so you know, this isn't a sequel to that Fright Night
remake from a couple of years back, but just Fright Night
remade yet again. This is like the fourth Fright
Night. The original from 1985, then in 2007 we had Never
Cry Werewolf which was Fright Night but with werewolves, the
actual remake, and now this. I'm gonna go ahead and make
an executive decision and call a halt to Fright Night.
Anyway, today's version of Charlie Brewster is being played by
Will Payne, and the new Charlie and his classmates are in
Romania for a week to take an art history class of some
sort. Best School Ever. Charlie is sad because his
girlfriend Amy (Sacha Parkinson) doesn't want to be his
girlfriend anymore because she saw him kissing a girl or
something, which will play into our narrative in some way down
the line.
But it is a Fright Night movie so you know the routine.
Charlie looks out his window, sees the hot lady across the
way, Gerri Dandridge (Murray), eat a prostitute, and not in
the happy ending type of way, tries to tell people but nobody
wants to listen. Then lo and behold, Gerri is actually
the professor of his art history class, and boy does she like
messing with poor Charlie. Actually, considering what
this woman likes to wear as her 'professor gear', she's pretty
much messing with every single male and gay female in her
audience.
As it turns
out, Professor Gerri is actually the sinister Madame Bathory
who we all know needs to bathe in the blood of virgins to stay
young and beautiful, or prostitutes, since I guess virgins are
really hard to come by nowadays. Fortunately for
Charley, he has an uber obnoxious friend in Ed (Chris Waller)
who has the vampire knowledge gene and has some theories on
how to take this beast down. Most of these theories
require the help of the editions version of Peter Vincent
(Sean Power), who hosts some kind of schlock ghost hunter TV
show.
Regardless of all of that nonsense, what Gerri really needs is
a virgin born on a blood moon at midnight at high tide, I
think, I can't remember, to become human again. Or
something. But where in the heck is she going to find a
virgin? In Transylvania? Unless by chance we have
just imported one. You mean to tell me, Charlie, you
haven't taken care of that business yet? No wonder your
girlfriend is mad at you. Will Charlie stop the madness
of this new Madame Bathory? Sure he will. It's a
Fright Night movie and it's been made like five times already.
There are issues with this version of 'Fright Night' my
friends, starting with the fact that it's the same version of
the movies that came before it, only falling short in almost
every comparable category. The young actors they have
playing our kids in trouble seem like nice people, but they
really aren't that great as actors as of yet, though I'm sure
they can get better over time. The problem with this is
that they couldn't sell me on anything that they were doing in
this movie. Jamie Murray is still an awful lot of fun to
look at, and sure enough she was vamping it up the best she
could, add to that she is also super pale which does kind of
lend itself to being a vampire type creature which did make
her existence the best thing about this movie, but in this
Horror / Thriller there wasn't much her version of Madame
Bathory could do generate any kind of scares, let alone
thrills. And we will be kind and not dwell on this
realities presentation of Peter Vincent.
What possibly could've helped this film, in the absence of
decent acting and an oppressive villain, would be action,
gore, violence, and maybe some subversive sexuality. The
action was sparse, but there was one scene in what looked to
be in some underground catacombs where our heroes were fleeing
the nutty vampire, and the narrow caverns made for some great
atmosphere, but for whatever reason director Eduardo Rodriguez
went with this strobe light effect, which for starters was
super annoying, but more importantly made it damn near
impossible to see anything, since you were getting blinded
every other second. The gore was rather light, so the
gore hounds need not apply, and the sexuality was subdued at
best. In retrospect, this Fright Night probably would've
better served as a complete exploitation film since the horror
and the thrills were fairly absent. It wouldn't have
made this a better movie, but it would've made it a more
memorable movie.
It's not like you don't have enough Fright Nights to choose
from, so I would probably skip this one and just jump in a
time machine back to 1985 enjoy the original in this one's
stead.
