A bland high school student (Anton Yelchin, left) suspects his neighbor (Colin Farrell) of being a vampire in this bloodless “Fright Night.”
Jerry is a cute guy who lives next door. He likes Budweiser. He’s a vampire. He’s Jerry the Vampire. “Fright Night” is convinced you’ll find all this very daring, hilarious and mold-breaking.
Instead, feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film. Generic Las Vegas high school student Charley (Anton Yelchin), his even blander girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots) and his nerd buddy Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) investigate the doings of a weird neighbor (Colin Farrell) whose windows are blacked out all day. But this is Vegas — people work on the Strip and sleep all day.
The movie takes far too long to get going, as Ed tries to convince Charley that his neighbor is the reason their friends are disappearing (a fact that seems to have been noticed by no one else). Ed then faces off against Jerry, but the rules of vampire engagement aren’t clear. Crosses, for instance, seem to work . . . a little.
Charley seems like a nice young man, but all the time the movie spends on quiet scenes trying to establish him and Amy as characters is a slog. A bit better is the teasing between him and Ed, but there isn’t enough of it. There are several overlong scenes, such as an odd but not very frightening encounter in which Jerry stands just outside Charley’s doorway chatting about nothing much as the teen gets him some beer. The big moment? Charley gets nervous and drops a beer on the floor. So what?
The director, Craig Gillespie, is a rookie in this genre (previously he did the quirky indie “Lars and the Real Girl” and the high school comedy “Mr. Woodcock”) and has a hard time making the minutes count. For instance, Charley breaks into Jerry’s house and spends several minutes trying to sneak out unnoticed — but Jerry eventually spots him and lets him go. So what was the point of the creeping around? Later, nobody thinks to call the cops on Jerry, even after he’s committed a major crime that, because it has nothing to do with being a vampire, could easily be explained to the constabulary.
In a chase scene, Charley’s mom (Toni Collette) drives nowhere useful, but straight out into the desert, where she won’t be able to get a phone signal and where Jerry can do some nasty business without many eyeballs nearby. Speaking of: Why don’t the neighbors in his tightly populated subdivision ever seem to spot any of the curious things that go on at Jerry’s house, such as a person who colorfully explodes on the front doorstep in full daylight?
The movie’s reason to exist is its self-consciously “sassy” dialogue, which is neither witty nor fresh. People being terrorized spew attempted hipness: “This is seriously not OK” and “We could have rocked this evil s – – t together.” Jerry says things like, “Ever gotten a stake in the chest? I have. It hurts!” When victims escape, he calls out, “Catch ya later!” All of this basically amounts to the same single joke, and it’s as old as Dracula’s prom tuxedo. This movie’s writer, Marti Noxon, used to work up similar material for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and the convention got pretty irritating even then.
Even one character who promises to be amusing — a spoof of Criss Angel (with a whiff of Russell Brand) who calls himself “Peter Vincent, Vampire Hunter” (David Tennant) — gradually diminishes until he’s just a worried sidekick who gets to spend the climax cowering next to Charley. Sidekick to Batman or John Wayne is one thing. Sidekick to Anton Yelchin? It would be more dignified to have a stranger’s fangs in his jugular.