Fright Night (2011)

The horror movie genre is probably the most popular type of film to remake or update.  Why is that?  Well, what looks cool and scary in 1982 doesn't usually hold up after a decade or two, and foreign horror movies oftentimes throw in bizarre supernatural stuff that doesn't make sense to American audiences (Japan, I'm looking at you).  Personally, I don't mind remakes; my favorite movie of all time, The Maltese Falcon, was the third adaptation of the story in a ten-year span.  The important thing is for the remakes to take what works from the original and improve the rest.  I haven't seen Fright Night (1985) in about fifteen years, and I think it was heavily edited with commercials on VH1 or something; I remember the basic plot, but my overwhelming memory is of a fairly cheesy vampire movie with the guy from Planet of the Apes.  If there is a moderately famous 80s horror movie that is ripe for a quality remake, this is it.

Fright Night (2011) tells the story of former high school nerd and current cool kid, Charley (Anton Yelchin).  You can tell that he's a cool kid, because he has a hot girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots) and the guys he hangs out with are douchebags.  Charley wasn't always this cool, though; not even two years ago, he was making his own sci-fi/fantasy-inspired armor and goofing around with the school's biggest dork, Ed (the perpetually nerdy Christopher Mintz-Plasse).  When Ed comes to Charley with the news that a suspicious amount of their classmates have vanished, Charley blows him off.  After all, he's a cool kid.  When Ed elaborates, presenting an argument that the disappearances center around Charley's neighbor's house, Charley ignores him.  When Ed outright states that Charley's neighbor, Jerry (Colin Farrell), is a vampire, that's when things start to get interesting.  Because Jerry is a vampire, and he is responsible for all the disappearances.  What do you do when your next-door neighbor is a blood-sucking monster?

A sexy blood-sucking monster who...loves fruit?

Well, I suppose you would want to move out and maybe rent out your place to a stranger.  But what kind of a horror movie would that make?

Aside from the fact that the supposedly teenage actors are all in their twenties, I liked the cast.  Anton Yelchin is fine as the not-as-cool-as-he-pretends-to-be lead character; he's not amazing or anything, but his job is to stand in contrast to the bad guy, which he does pretty well.  It helps that Colin Farrell turned in a pretty awesome vampire performance.  I'm usually confused when vampires are portrayed as seductive and sexy --- and this is most vampire movies, not just the new wave of teen flicks --- but Farrell felt dangerous and sleazy every second he was on camera.  He's just that perfect blend of sex and violence; while not my favorite style of vampire (I prefer the monstrous Nosferatu-types), Farrell might be the best update to the classic Dracula vampire I have seen in a long while.

I love when evil personified just seems mildly annoyed

Imogen Poots was decent as Charley's girlfriend and it was nice to see her as more than just a damsel in distress, but some of her choices are a little odd.  I don't blame Poots' performance, it is just that her character didn't always make sense ("my boyfriend is acting bizarre...perhaps I should offer to take his virginity?").  On the plus side, I have been amusing myself by saying her last name out loud.

Whisper softly in his ear: "Poooooots"

Christopher Mintz-Plasse is as dorky as ever, so don't expect much new from him.  He's a fine nerd, and was a good casting choice, but you basically know what you're getting when he pops up in a movie.  Toni Collette was third-billed in the film and played Charley's mother, but she was a surprising non-entity in the story.  She was only okay (I guess) for the few scenes she had early in the movie, and then her character all but vanishes.  I did like David Tennant as the Criss Angel-ish vampire expert.  He wasn't a bad-ass or anything, but this is a story that is better with incompetent experts.  Oh, and you might recognize the eyebrows of one of the popular kids at school --- that's Dave Franco, little brother to James.  And, not surprisingly, Chris Sarandon makes a cameo as a nod to the original film.  Of course he does; what else is he busy doing now?

Is that the werewolf from Underworld?

I think what I liked best about Fright Night was the fact that it didn't waste my time.  A kid thinks his neighbor is a vampire, the audience realizes he's right, and there is no time wasted on him trying to convince his mother, girlfriend or the police. That is brilliant!  Instead of pussyfooting around for a half-hour, asking "Why won't anyone believe my insane theory?", we are instead treated to Jerry the Vampire immediately opting to attack Charley and his family.  No muss, no fuss.  And I loved the general attitude Jerry has; he doesn't care about having his secret revealed, he's a killing machine that solves his problems with murder.

...and he gets turned on by death.  Makes sense.

That means that this movie has a lot of action, something very few vampire movies can boast.  While I know that a lot of what I like came from the screenplay, I really liked the general attitude of the movie, and for that I credit director Craig Gillespie.  There is some pretty great atmosphere in Fright Night, and he balances it well with humor.  It never gets campy or stupid, even when some bits lean a little too much toward ridiculousness.  This isn't the work of an auteur, but it's competent and pretty smart.

There is one glaring flaw in Fright Night, though: the vampires.  While Colin Farrell is pretty great, the CGI used to make him and his vampire minions vamp out was awful.  The filmmakers toy with the notion of the vamps being literal monsters --- as in, only vaguely humanoid --- but they don't commit to it, and it is never important in the story.  Instead, we are given scenes with Colin Farrell's head bulging and cracking as he develops a Predator-style food hole for reasons I can't fathom.  The vampires are at their best when they are being seductive or surprisingly scary, not when they are doing a bad impression of Resident Evil creatures.  Oh, and the twist with David Tennant's character was pretty lame.  I would have preferred it if the world wasn't that small, after all.

Guns don't kill people.  Vampires do.  And guns...kill vampires...?

The lack of cool special effects, coupled with the presence of awful special effects, prevents Fright Night from being a modern classic, but it is still very entertaining.  If you are tired of romantic vampires or if you want to see how to successfully take the camp out of a story, this is a good place to start.  This is also a good place to get your "cool vampire" fix for the next few months.  Good vampire movies are rare, and even rarer when they include this much action.

Centurion

In the days between Boadicea's revolt and the building of Hadrian's Wall, the expanding Roman empire and the natives of Great Britain were at a stalemate.  The expansion had effectively stopped, but the two sides would frequently skirmish.  Sometime in the 110s or 120s, the Roman Ninth Legion, who were assigned to the Roman-Briton frontier, disappeared from Roman records, which is strange, since they were fairly meticulous with their official paperwork.  Were they simply disbanded, with the men being assigned to other military groups?  Perhaps they fought and died in Germania?  Both are fairly reasonable possibilities, but since the last known location of the Ninth is in York, some believe that they met their fate in Northern England or Scotland.  Why the history lesson?  Centurion is one of two recent films to speculate on the fate of the Ninth Legion (the other being the Channing Tatum vehicle, The Eagle).  While this film does not claim to be factual, a little context helps put things in perspective.

Sexual fetish or prisoner of war?  Context makes a difference.

The Picts, a Scottish clan, have been using guerrilla warfare against the invading Romans for a while.  One night, they launch an attack on a Roman garrison, killing all but Quintus (Michael Fassbender), and only because he cursed them in their own language.  Why that matters when so many Picts in this movie speak English, I don't know, but Quintus is deemed "important" and is captured instead of being killed.  Meanwhile, the Ninth Legion is dispatched to kill some Picts for the glory of Rome; they are given a mute Pict tracker, Etain (Olga Kurylenko), to hunt down the rebellious Picts.  You may be wondering why a Pict would hunt her own people, and that's a good question.  The answer given is because she is loyal to Rome.  Obviously.  Quintus manages to escape his captors and accidentally runs into the Ninth.

He had them right where he wanted them

They kill the Picts chasing him, and Quintus agrees to accompany the Ninth to the Pict base.  Remember when you asked why the Romans trust a Pict guide?  Well, it turns out that the provided answer was not the correct one; she was guiding them into a trap.  The Ninth is massacred, with only a handful of soldiers surviving through luck or cowardice; the Picts also captured the general of the Legion, Titus (Dominic West) and brought him to their base camp.  As the ranking officer, Quintus is now in charge of the group.  What should they do?  They are depressingly far behind enemy lines, and Etain has shown a mad-on for hunting down Romans in general and this group of Romans in particular.  Can this centurion lead his men home to safety?

Not if Etain has nothing to say about it.  You know, because she's mute.

This is the second film I have seen and reviewed from director Neil Marshall, and I think I'm beginning to identify his strengths.  Centurion is a bloody and gory movie, which is exactly what any film about a Roman rebellion should be; if dozens of characters are supposed to be dying by sword and hatchet wounds, there damn well better be some severed body parts and blood.  The action scenes are good, and some of the death scenes were totally awesome.  My favorite example of the awesomeness comes from a character who has been speared, but then pushes the spear through his body to stab and kill his enemy.  It's probably harder than it looks.  Aside from the totally respectable violence, Marshall captured the natural beauty of Scotland in long-shot after long-shot of the group running for their lives.

Marshall doesn't do much with the characters, though.  The performances are all fine.  Michael Fassbender is suitably heroic and he is only marginally less of a tough guy than he was in 300.  Former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko was convincing in her action scenes and...well, she was mute, so she didn't talk much.  The rest of the cast was capable with their parts; Dominic West was almost likable as the general, JJ Feild was kind of scummy, Liam Cunningham was decent as an old soldier, and Imogen Poots was okay as the curiously clean local witch.  Nobody gave a bad performance, but there was no depth to these characters.  I could care less about who lived and who died.  Thanks to this lack of likable characters, the adventure in the film lost any sense of urgency it might have had. 

"Not likable?  Perhaps you missed my smoldering stare...?"

The key to a good movie about soldiers is to make the audience give a crap about them as people.  Centurion doesn't even try to do this.  The film looks gorgeous at times and the action is fun to watch, which is especially impressive given the low budget, but the story never takes off because you never care what happens next. 

Death scene or sex scene?  You won't care which.

On the one hand, Centurion encourages me to watch another Neil Marshall movie because this one was a visual treat.  On the other hand, I can't imagine that Doomsday has a better story than this.  After the brutality of the initial battle, I had high hopes.  Centurion just doesn't live up to them.