Fright Night

1985 horror comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A high school kid starts to believe his neighbors are vampires and recruits a pair of friends and a washed-up movie star to help him prove it.

After seeing this on a few "best of" lists, I anticipated something unique and fun, especially for somebody like me who actually likes the horror-comedy genre. Unfortunately, I didn't get much from this one.

Some of the special effects are pretty good, but I've seen better effects in 80's horror movies. The comedy works about as well as other 80's comedies. The characters are very typical of the types of characters you would expect to see in a movie like this from this particular time. The exception might be Roddy McDowell who plays a washed-up actor who may or may not be a vampire killer when he's not filming movies. He plays the character like he's playing Vincent Price playing the same character, and I liked him more than the others. I wanted to like the suave vampire guy, but he was a little boring. Munching on apples, being suave. That's pretty much all he had going for him there. I really hated the over-the-top Evil Ed character and thought Stephen Geoffreys was pretty awful.

It's not that anything about this movie is really bad. It's just not really anything great. A lot of its parts are very good, but I can't figure out why the sum of those parts is anything that people actually remember or think is worth watching a second time.

I'm bumping this up a point just because I know I'm biased against vampires. That's what happens when one harassed your entire family when you were growing up. I also think I might have loved this had I seen it when I was supposed to. The 12-year-old Shane might have really dug this. Unfortunately, a vampire-hating middle-aged Shane is the one who saw it first.