The Blurb:
By day Gerri Dandridge is a sexy professor, but by night she transforms into a real-life vampire with an unquenchable thirst for human blood. So when a group of high school students travel abroad to study in Romania, they find themselves ensnared in Gerri's chilling web of lust and terror. Charley and "Evil" Ed must stop Gerri from drinking and bathing in the blood of a "new moon virgin," which just so happens to be Charley's ex-girlfriend, Amy. They enlist help from Peter Vincent, the vampire hunting host of a reality show called "Fright Night," to drive a stake through Gerri's plan and save Amy from a fate far worse than death.
The Review:
Was it horrific? Kinda.
Was it sexy? Not like I wished.
Was it intense? Mostly.
Was it a decent vampire film? Kinda.
I admit, I never saw the latest 2011 remake, Fright Night, with Colin Farrell. So, my evaluation of Fright Night 2 is totally independent of any other versions of this movie, even though I vaguely recall the old Fright Night films from the late 80's.
Was it worth watching as a DVD rental? YES. The movie was made for DVD, never even hit the theaters.
Straight up:
I wish I could read this novel. But there is no novel. Somebody needs to take the script and adapt it to a novel, which could be so much better than the film. Better dialogue, better exposition, better everything.
So, I want a novel that has never been published.
Sorry, I'm a vampire fiction junky.
This movie should have been better in so many ways, but, before I go there, I am going to talk about what Fright Night 2 did right:
1) Sex APPEAL
This film had SHIT-TONS of sex appeal: a butt naked girl hanging upside down to drain her blood into a tub. Very Inspiring. We get a couple of almost lesbian vampire scenes (could have been way better--barely scraped the tip of that iceberg). Then there's the smoking hot Gerri Dandridge played by Jaime Murray, a.k.a. Elisabeth Bathory, the embodiment of what every female vampire should be.
Gerri got everything right. She is the only reason to watch the movie.
2) Teen Angst
Plenty of teen angst. Probably more than I wanted, but it was the prerequisite stuff. You gotta have a college kid pining over his girlfriend. Its a written law somewhere in vampire films.
3) Interesting and unique facets of the vampire mythos:
This film was chocked full of Romanian vampire history. I LOVED THAT. I am a total vampire history junky. This movie did FULL justice to vampire mythos of old. Even if it was based on early versions of the myths surrounding Elisabeth Bathory who literally bathed in the blood of virgins. Yep, that shit really happened. Not much of a stretch to build a vampire story out of that. And we get plenty of the wonderful naked Gerri bathing-in-blood scenes.
▼Even if you hate the movie, you must watch it for these scenes▼
Now, the bad stuff:
>>>Uninspired and somewhat ridiculous dialogue is peppered throughout the whole movie. I have seen better dialogue on Power Rangers.
>>>Action scenes were seriously lacking. In a vampire film, I expect matrixy, underworldish, blade style action. Effing Twilight (the first movie) had better action that this. The film really really needed some Asian guy to come in and beef up the action choreography. It was shitty.
>>>There was no real 'fright' or scare moment. This isn't really horror. Its simply a nod to vampire fans, that's it. You can see an attempt is made to scare you, and my three year old would probably get scared, if I let him watch (not happening), but no one over the age of five would call this a 'scary movie.'
>>>The lame attempts at comedy fell flat. Even if its not scary, and the dialogue sucks, and the action scenes look like they were filmed by high school kids doing a project, I still expect to have at least one laugh-out-loud moment. Not.
So, really, the only reason to see this movie is Gerri:
Gerri – Elisabeth Bathory – carries the film, limping along, and makes it all worthwhile. Somebody give this woman a medal for salvaging an underbudgeted, cheesy vampire flick.
And here's one more, because the cover art is so phenomenal, much better than the film:
I'm completely in love with Jaime Murray, have been since the second she appeared on Warehouse 13. For that reason alone I'll check this out. Thank you for setting realistic expectations.
ReplyDeleteA good review in my opinion, Jaime Murray was the only decent part of it.
ReplyDeleteI gave up on the film, which is a rare occurrence, especially in a vampire/horror movie, but I just couldn't make it through.
As far I could tell, it had nothing to do with Fright Night in any way except for the title, which was merely used to try and generate some interest in it.
As for the Elisabeth Bathory stuff, as a big fan of the legends about her, I was disappointed by it.
PS, it was an amusing coincidence to see this since I recently did a review of the original Fright Night - one of my all time favourite horror/vampire movies on my own blog - http://ksjsrandomworld.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/fright-night-halloween-favourite.html
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