Fright Night: written by Marti Noxon, based on the 1985 movie written by Tom Holland; directed by Craig Gillespie; starring Anton Yelchin (Charlie Brewster), Colin Farrell (Jerry), Toni Collette (Jane Brewster), David Tennant (Peter Vincent), Imogen Poots (Amy) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Ed) (2011): Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon manages to rewrite Fright Night so as to make it a lot better than its original. Only Roddy McDowall's delightful horror host Peter Vincent is sorely missed here, though former Doctor Who David Tennant does the best he can with a somewhat unfocused role as a Criss Angel-like Vegas magician who's also an occult collector a la Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.
Frankly, the Vincent role would be funnier (and truer to the original) if we had someone like Steve Coogan playing Vincent as an aging, occult-obsessed rock star suddenly faced with the real thing. Oh, well. Tennant does have a terrific smoking scene. But I'd still like to see an old rock star with a fetish for Aleister Crowley and The Lord of the Rings taking on the hounds of Hell. Wouldn't everybody?
The bare bones of the story remain the same as in the original: geeky Charlie Brewster comes to believe a vampire has moved in next door to him. Almost no one believes him, but he's right. Vampiric shenanigans ensue.
The movie cleverly moves the action to Las Vegas, where despite the anti-vampiric sun, there's lots of good eating in a town with a lot of itinerants and a large population of people who are already nocturnal due to their night jobs at the casinos and hotels. There's real wit in our first look at Charlie's subdivision, which seems to sit in the middle of an empty desert.
Yelchin and the other actors do nice work here, though the character of 'Evil' Ed gets shoved off-stage rapidly so as to focus more on Charlie's ass-kicking girlfriend Amy, played by hellacute Brit Imogen Poots (!). The always reliable Toni Collette, who now seems to be the go-to actress for American single moms, also gets to be a bit more pro-active on the vampire-fighting front.
Colin Farrell plays the vampire (incongruously named Jerry) as an Alpha Male thug, and it works nicely as a counterpoint to all those more refined vampires out there. Director David Gillespie stages some nifty setpieces, most notably a funny/scary car chase in which a realtor's sign makes a surprisingly welcome appearance. All in all, an enjoyable romp. Recommended.
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on the 1973 movie of the same name written by Nigel McKeand; directed by Troy Nixey; starring Bailee Madison (Sally), Katie Holmes (Kim) and Guy Pearce (Alex) (2011): As with Pan's Labyrinth, this film can either be viewed as a fairy story told not to but by a child, or it can be viewed as a story with annoying plot holes and lapses in character motivation.
I'd go with the first choice, as the tone, the atmosphere and even the performances would support such a view even if one didn't know that Guillermo del Toro had something to do with this.
Based on a 1973 TV movie that got del Toro interested in horror in the first place. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark features plucky, misunderstood 10-year-old Sally, a girl suffering through the divorce of her parents and, soon, persecution by tiny monsters living beneath the basement of the old New England house her father is renovating for profit.
Oh, it's Rhode Island -- that an H.P. Lovecraft allusion whether one wants it or not. Explicitly referenced in the film is Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen, whose stories often featured the monstrous real creatures behind the myths and legends (Machen's "The White People" and "The Shining Pyramid" are the two stories most relevant to this one). A doomed 19th-century painter and naturalist gets named (Ralph Waldo?) Emerson (Algernon?) Blackwood. Hoo ha.
The father is distant and somewhat thick (remember the fairy tale elements here or you'll obsess over stupid parents a bit too much), his new girlfriend sympathetic to Sally and, ultimately, an ally. The little, talkative monsters are a bit of a letdown -- they're basically Gollum crossed with a rat -- but occasionally scary, though if someone had the sense to buy a tennis racket, they'd be a lot less dangerous. Troy Nixey summons a lot of atmosphere and a real sense of place; the opening titles (directed, I assume, by someone other than Nixey) are stunning. Recommended.
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel by Stephen King (2012): AKA Dark Tower 4.5, this novel takes place between Wizard & Glass and The Wolves of the Calla. Very little action takes place in the frame tale, as Roland the Gunslinger and his ka-tet of three people and a raccoon-like billybumbler have to shack up for a couple of days because of a "starkblast" (note the Game of Thrones allusion), a freezing cold wind system that can occasionally scour parts of dying Mid-World.
While holed up, Roland tells his people (and us) two stories, one nested within another. The first story involves the then-young gunslinger's assignment to find a murderous, shape-changing "Skinman" in one of the outlying, salt-mining towns of dying Gilead. Within that story, the young Roland tells a boy survivor of one of the attacks the Gilead fairytale of "The Wind Through the Keyhole."
The fairy story (which dovetails pretty neatly with what we already know of Roland's dying Earth/Mid-World, and ultimately seems more history than legend) involves the quest of a just-pre-adolescent boy to avenge his father's murder. This being Mid-World, where magic and technology co-exist (or are perhaps the same thing), the quest takes some wild turns before the end.
It's quite pleasant to once again be in the world of the Gunslinger, especially with such a low-key situation in the frame story. King gets in some allusions and references to a wide variety of influences here, including most notably Yann Martel's novel The Life of Pi. But we also get an incongruous gear shift, the aforementioned supercold (Ned?) starkblast, the almost de rigeur Wizard of Oz reference, veiled references to perennial King douchebag Randall Flagg, a dragon, a Tinkerbell-like fairy, the world's most useful GPS, some odd but endearing mutants, a horrific shapechanger, and at least some closure to the young Roland's lingering guilt over his role in the death of his doomed, malignly magicked mother Gabrielle.
While this may seem like a novel meant only for those who've already read the Dark Tower series, I'd hazard a guess that it would also work well as a brief (well, 300 pages -- for Stephen King, that's basically a short story) gateway book for the series, seeing as it's concerned almost entirely with the past of Roland's world and Roland's own story. Recommended.
