Exploring the Sequels

# 10 Fright Night 2

A sequel with bite, worthy of its master.

In the history of horror sequels for every Evil Dead 2, Dawn of the Dead, Bride of Frankenstein, and Aliens, we also get Blair Witch: Book of Shadows, An American Werewolf in Paris, The Lost Boys 2, or Poltergeist 2. One thing I love about horror sequels is that it’s actually harder to name outright bad ones like these with no real redeeming qualities that aren’t at least really fun cheese sandwiches to eat up like Silent Night Deadly Night 2, and many # 2’s in a horror franchise are actually great (Halloween 2, Hellraiser: Hellbound) to pretty damn good (Psycho 2, Friday the 13th Part 2).

By 1988, Fright Night was a cult hit and established itself as THE quintessential vampire horror comedy of the decade. The initial plans for a sequel had been stalled and original director Tom Holland and star Chris Sarandon had begun filming Child’s Play instead. Amanda Bearse was a season into costarring on Married With Children and Stephen Geoffries signed up to star in Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund’s, directorial debut 976-EVIL.

Fellow Kentuckian Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, IT miniseries) from my own town (along with frequent collaborator John Carpenter), and no stranger to the pressures of sequels, picked up the highly improbable bowling ball of the vampire classic Holland created and knocked down enough positive pins to recreate a closely matched sequel in atmosphere and tone while unburdening himself with reaching the unlikely goal of meeting the original in its perfectly sanquine, undead eyes. Despite the stakes(!), Wallace is rollin strikes.

Tommy Lee Wallace rewrote the story with mostly new characters but maintained the style and feel of Holland’s original. Wallace understood the assignment in taking that which worked in Fright Night and reworking the story into a new setting while adding his own visual flair and upping the comedy with his darker quirks. Wallace’s greatest strength is that he’s a director for hire yes, but he’a also a stylist who can turn out some low key iconic imagery we horror fans never forget.

Whether it be a little kid wearing a pumpkin mask that explodes into snakes and bugs to the world’s most annoying jingle as his parents look on in horror, a subterranean, shapeshifting, nightmare clown pointing at you with maniacal, knowing laughter on the side of a road in a small Maine town, or an ambiguous, MTV ready bad ass vampire roller skating towards the screen with arms and fangs out ready to give you your last kiss goodnight. You never get the feeling during Fright Night 2 that Wallace isn’t a huge fan of the original and loves being there, attempting to do right by Tom Holland.

Fright Night 2 is the opposite of a different comedy sequel that released the year before based off a very successful movie also from 1985 like Fright Night. I’m again embarrassingly forgetting the title but I do remember previous star, Michael J Fox, didn’t return so they cast a young Jason Bateman as his cousin. Instead of a high school basketball player he’s a college boxer. He blossoms into a werewolf, gets the girl, life becomes easier, he gains an ego, but finally learns a lesson that in order to truly be successful and win at that boxing ring of life he must be truly be himself and not rely on the wolf. And Styles shows up again but is played by a different actor. Basically it takes everything from the original but makes it….terrible. If Fright Night 2 did not have a B-Movie pro like Tommy Lee Wallace it may have met the same eternal fate of damnation.

Ahhh, I’ll think of the name later.

Fright Night picks up a few years later after the death of Charley Brewster’s ex neighbor Jerry Dandridge, by the hands of him and Fright Night horror host, Peter Vincent. Charlie now attends college attempting to live a normal life having rejected his belief in the reality of vampires through intensive therapy. Amanda Bearse’s Amy, is out of the picture as he pursues (poorly in my opinion) his new love interest, Alex, a fellow coed (outta this guy’s league, trust me) determined to become a psychiatrist and she is aware and supportive (too supportive) of him working through his fear of vampires and believing that Jerry Dandridge was your run of the mill, totally human killer.

Charley soon falls under the spell of the other worldly beautiful and mysterious, Regine, a dancer and performance artist that shows up around campus and moves into the same awesomely storm cloud colored, gothic style apartment building of our old friend Peter Vincent near by. Not only do all fangs point to Regine and her band of uniquely stylish, provocative entourage being undead children of the night but we find out that she is also the ancient and vengeful sister of Jerry with sinister plans to toy with Charley and Peter Vincent before killing Peter and turning Charley into her vampire servant to torture for eternity. With the help of Peter and Alex, Charley must face off with and destroy them all before, like his ex Amy in Fright Night, he loses the ones he cares for most and unwillingly becomes the same monster he hates and fears.

The plot overall works until we reach the third act and a subplot involving Alex, Charley’s therapist, and Peter Vincent in an asylum bogs down the momentum of the otherwise stealthy plot. It’s great that Alex has more to do in this as a centralized figure in the action but it feels tacked on with a final showdown that wraps up too similarly to Fright Night dispatching the vampires much too easily but at least in visually creative ways.

There’s a lot that works well here though, with some actual improvements over part 1. Our only returning champions are William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowall. Without these two leads a sequel would not have worked and both actors are back. Roddy McDowall brings the same perfectly calibrated level of campy English theatrics to Peter Vincent as before. Ragsdale is actually better in this than Fright Night acting with a more subdued, naturalistic style and not reciting his lines loudly like he’s performing to the back row of a theater company in Wichita. He’s more confident in his performance this time and it shows. Neither are phoning it in and the movie soars higher for it (like a bat y’all).

Tracy Lynn as Alex, is also more subdued in her role and avoids the loudly shrill reactions and line reads of Amanda Bearse that matched William Ragsdale’s energy in Fright Night. The biggest issue here is I never believed once that she would date this guy. Vampires moving in next door is more believable. You can do better Alex I swear. And I may have had a crush on her as a kid watching it with my parents.

While Fright Night 2 does take some hits with the absence of standouts Chris Sarandon and Stephen Jeffries, there are some well cast villains to fill in the void. Regine’s # 2 Bell (Russell Clark), goofy womanizer Louie (the great John Gries) and driver/muscle Bozworth (Brian Thompson) all three have unique personalities both threatening and funny who at first feel like complete opposites bonded only by their joined vampirism. But later in a truly inspired comedic montage we get Regina’s coven blowing off steam and having fun in a bowling alley after hours, goofing off and using an employee’s head as a ball.

Wallace is showing us that these three, in another possibly mortal life, could have been old friends acting like kids again to the music of Wilson Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour. It’s a throwaway scene that should not work but miraculously does. Wallace creates a couple of similar montages, in spirit, of friends bonding in the It miniseries two years later, but neither capture the childlike fun of a few homicidal monsters playing frames while striking the patrons and sparing no one.

First introduced in a “this is the 80’s” picture perfect shot in an old timey elevator each vampire bares individual characteristics and traits through even more fantastic creature effects this time. Louie has the ability to turn into a wolf/bat hybrid at will scaring dogs, scaling walls, and hanging from roofs. John Gries gets to be funny, charming, vulnerable, and annoying all at once before showing that he’s a serious threat to Alex. He even gets a one liner when he dies reminiscent of his death scene as the Wolfman in The Monster Squad the year before. Bozworth, in the Renfield role, is a hulking, square jawed beast, but also a quiet intellectual, snatching moths and beetles from every crack and crevice he can find and proudly reciting their scientific genus and species before making them a snack.

Bell never speaks but holds a regal air like a royal court advisor and confidant to Regine. Fiercely loyal and obviously Regine’s favorite, he feels older and more powerful than the others. Clark’s introduction is attacking a young college student in a dark, abandoned campus hallway but not by running, flying, or levitating typical of old fashioned vampire lore. No, Bell is something cooler and more culturally aware, more modern than the old school tricks of turning into bat, wolf, or fog. Bell races towards his prey on roller skates beyond fashionable, all gender fluidity, and dangerously feline. Tommy Lee Wallace gave us the first and only roller skating vamp for the ages and Clark doesn’t get enough love for making this scene not only work but deserves cult status as one the great blood sucking icons.

Julie Carmen must fill the empty coffin left by a missing Sarandon and takes the antagonistic role with aplomb. Like her brother, she’s stoic, charming, sexy, fiercely intelligent, and you get why someone would helplessly follow her into the darkness of night. She doesn’t get the same opportunities as Sarandon to bite and chew the scenery with humorous dialogue but she makes up for that with her physicality as a trained dancer in multiple scenes beguiling her audience to the sound of Brad Fiedel’s “Come to Me”.

Like Jerry in Fright Night, Regine, thankfully is not given a backstory but she seems even more ancient, wise, and commanding than Jerry. Some long forgotten queen incognito, shape shifted through the millennia. Performance art her craft and her cover to kill. In a way Regine is more terrifying than her brother. Jerry Dandridge promised turning you as a form of eternal safety and personal freedom. Regine promises agonizing death or infinite torture and misery. Jerry survived for a thousand years by flying under the radar. Regine is the radar and Carmen owns every scene from her provocative pose laying atop Charley’s car to her concluding scenes exposed in her true form as a grotesque creature to match her brother’s own final rattle-mouse like image.

Other highlights and details include Charley driving the same Ford Mustang as in part 1 but it now has the full paint job it lacked in Fright Night. Regine’s dance with Charley in which she waves a beaded necklace in his face and you see, from his first person perspective, her face change into another version of herself. Regine taking over as Fright Night’s host and performing a televised dance in which again her face changes in to an even different version. Alex inexplicably speed reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula at an inhuman pace while wearing adorably oversized glasses, and that somehow being the catalyst for her believing vampires are real. And Peter Vincent naming off fake horror movies in his awesomely decked out apartment that he’s starred in throughout his career. I would watch everyone one of them.

Fright Night 2 is not its predecessor but still a worthy member of its clan, an under seen gem that deserves to be unearthed from its ligneous coffin lost to time by horror fans unfamiliar with its allure. What could be misremembered as an uninspired rehash cash grab is actually an honorable, better than expected sequel upping the stakes with scenes that glamour us into a state much like Charley, mesmerized by eternal style, danger, and the glamour of maximalist, flamboyant fun. A sequel like a shrouded creature of the night swaying us to dance. Take its hand and enjoy. Like Regine, Fright Night 2 doesn’t fully survive the night but it looks damn good trying.

So get comfy and kick back in your college dorm room, say goodbye to your 35 year old looking roommate, whip up a bowl of homemade Drilini, and let Fright Night suck way less than you’d ever expect.

It’s Horrorble!

Did you think I would forget the movie I was referring to way up there??

Ha…I got it…….Back to the Future 2, baby!

Next time we’ll be breaking down the remake of Fright Night (2011). Will it be a worthy retelling or just suck?