Movie Doctor: How To Fix ‘Fright Night’

Every once in a while, we'll take an enjoyable-but-not-flawless movie and humbly suggest five little alterations. With our help, it'll be JUST right. (Warning: There will be SPOILERS.)

There was mass carnage at the multiplex -- emo band name! -- this weekend, with all four major new releases crashing and burning. Perhaps the most disappointing performance came from "Fright Night," which had a smart director, a built-in fan base and an impressive cast that was game and ready. It still didn't even crack the top five, and it might have smothered Colin Farrell's recent career resurgence in the crib. We're not crazy about the movie either, but we think we know how it could have worked. Filmmakers, we hope you're paying attention.

1. Forget "Twilight" all together. When the original "Fright Night" came out, it was an homage to old vampire movies that had been forgotten: Campy, Vincent Price, I vant to suck ver blood business. Vampires are now popular again, but in an entirely different way: The "Twilight" fans (who are the reason this movie exists in the first place) might not even know what the word "Dracula" means. So a lot of the fun the first film has with vampire conventions is repeated here, to far lesser effect; the only things the vampires of this movie have in common with the "Twilight" ones are sharp teeth. So, rather than try to nod to the "Twilight" world, just drop it all together: Go old school with it and let people know they're not getting a "Twilight" riff. You might say that would have hurt the marketing ... but it's not like playing up the teen angst stuff helped out much last weekend anyway.

2. Stop playing so much for the fanboys. We're sure it sounded like a good idea to cast Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the nerdy vampire expert Eddie, but it wasn't: Mintz-Plasse isn't refined enough an actor to go full bore, and you end up just yelling, "Hey, look, McLovin!" at the screen. Same with David Tennant -- who played Doctor Who on the BBC series -- as Peter Vincent, the role Roddy McDowell played in the first film. Tennant's a fine actor, but he's not quite unhinged enough to make the Criss Angel-esque character work; a more traditionally comic actor might have worked better in the part. (Martin Starr might have been perfect.) It feels like Tennant's just there as a glom to the sci-fi kids.

3. Give Toni Collette something to do. We couldn't help but think "Fright Night" had something up its sleeve when we saw that Toni Collette was playing the thankless role of the mom: You wouldn't cast an actress as intriguing as Toni Collette if you weren't going to use her, would you? Turns out: The movie doesn't use her. It feels like large sections of her character's story were left on the cutting room floor, and she doesn't do much more than bat her eyes at Colin Farrell, lie in a hospital bed and faint once. You should never ask Toni Collette to faint in a movie. It's beneath her.

4. More action. The film's best scene is when Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) and his mom and girlfriend attempt to drive away from their home, and Farrell chases them and ultimately attaches himself to the bottom of their car, with explosive results. The scene is assured and confident and thrilling in a way the rest of the movie isn't; director Craig Gillespie feels far more at home with a vampire attack scene than a teenage boy talking to his girlfriend. The movie really only has maybe three scenes of legitimate action. All three are sharp and well-directed; we want more.

5. Good lord that 3-D. We are not as militant about 3-D as, say, Roger Ebert, but man oh man is the 3-D awful in "Fright Night." The movie is as bad as any non-retro-converted 3-D movie in memory with its distracting "look, we're throwing something through the screen" gimmicks -- honestly, didn't Albert Brooks kill that joke 30 years ago? -- but that's not even the biggest problem. We understand that when you are making a movie about vampires, most of the film must take place in the dark. But never has 3-D's inherent problem with brightness been more obvious: Even during the great car scene we described above, we found ourselves squinting to catch everything that was going on. (Note: Squinting does not, in fact, help.) It's probably a bad sign when you spend much of a vampire desperate for the sun to come out.

Thanks for a moment of your time, filmmakers. You're welcome.