Today's Feature: Fright Night 2: New Blood (2013)
In 2011, when I reviewed the mediocre remake of director Tom Holland's brilliant Fright Night, I honestly didn't believe it could get any worse than that disposable heap of "3-D" putrescence. I was wrong, because if 2011's Fright Night is the bottom of the barrel, then Fright Night 2: New Blood is so far beneath the bottom of the barrel that the cast of this ill-intentioned non-sequel would need a high-powered telescope just to catch a glimpse of the bottom of the barrel. It's that bad.
Somehow, against all odds, this cadre of lunatics and fools managed to make something so inept, so atrocious, that it actually managed to make that execrable remake of Fright Night look almost good in comparison. If that was the goal of the cast and crew of Fright Night 2: New Blood, then well played, but we all know that's not the case. Fright Night 2: New Blood is just another remake of Fright Night, only cheaper and dumber and set in Romania, because the producers wanted to take advantage of the country's generous tax breaks for foreign film productions.
Charley Brewster and his on/off girlfriend Amy and their obnoxious pal "Evil" Ed are attending classes in Romania on a student exchange program, and most of these classes take place in the dead of night, which is necessary because their professor is Gerri Dandridge, who is a lady vampire, and also Elizabeth Bathory, who some braindead haunted castle tour guide claims to be the real inspiration behind Bram Stoker's legendary Count Dracula, which has no basis in reality, no matter what your vampire-loving dumbass friends might tell you when you're getting high in the basement while listening to your garbage nu-metal iTunes playlist.
This movie can't even get the story of Elizabeth Bathory herself right, making up some bullshit lore about the fabled Countess being attacked by a feral vampire in a mist enshrouded forest, feasting on the blood of young virgin girls not to maintain her youth, but because she's burning through virgins in an effort to find that one special virgin who was born at the stroke of midnight on the night of a blood moon while an owl flew across its face and a lone wolf howled mournfully in the distance while two horny rabbits fucked in a pile of hay next to a pregnant horse in an old barn on a Friday the 13th or whatever. When she bathes in the blood of this special virgin, her ancient curse will finally be broken and she will be human again, which is I guess a thing she wants for some reason.
This is clearly a world where the supernatural is real, and vampires can be harmed and even killed with holy water and religious objects like crucifixes and the like, which means God is real and vampires are abominations against God, so their immortal souls are damned to Hell if and when they die, so why would they yearn to become mortal? I don't know if a soul as rotten as this movie's version of Elizabeth Bathory could possibly hope to atone for her centuries of mortal sins, so what's the point of becoming human again?
New Blood follows the basic Fright Night formula (it's ridiculous that a Fright Night formula is an actual thing now), with Charley suspecting Dandridge to be a vampire, trying to call the local authorities who refuse to believe him, finally asking his pal Ed for advice, who points him in the direction of somebody named Peter Vincent. In this movie, Peter Vincent is the host of a reality TV series in the vein of Ghost Hunters, traveling the world in search of things that go bump in the night. I have to admit that the concept of approaching a guy in the entertainment industry who specializes in monsters and folklore is a much smarter idea than just trying to convince a jaded Las Vegas magician to help you slay a fucking vampire, so I guess this version of the story gets that point over the 2011 remake, but that's literally the only point I will ever award this broken toilet of a movie.
Is this a good time to mention how literally every single acting performance in this movie is just appalling? This never-ending parade of dire performances actually makes viewing Fright Night 2: New Blood a thoroughly unpleasant experience, with young Will Payne's portrayal of Charley Brewster deserving of special attention. This greasy prick spends the first third of the movie leering uncomfortably at every woman who passes through his field of vision, with his lips fixed in a slimy little half-smile that never touches his beady little eyes. This guy is more suited for the role of some limp-dick date rapist frat boy in a very special Lifetime original movie, because he's perhaps the worst possible choice for the lead of a Fright Night movie.
You're supposed to like Charley Brewster. He's supposed to be a decent, relatable guy. William Ragsdale nailed that character in the original Fright Night. The late Anton Yelchin's performance in the 2011 remake was one of the few things I praised about that movie. For all of that movie's problems, its characterization of Charley Brewster was certainly not one of them. But this movie's version of the character is just so wrong-headed that it beggars belief. He's not relatable. He doesn't seem like a decent guy. He's just an insipid little twerp taking up space in a movie with no redeeming qualities.
What about New Blood's iteration of "Evil" Ed? He yells a lot, he makes a bunch of goofy faces, and he's an idiot. That's it. He's transformed by Gerri Dandridge for absolutely no reason in this story, then Charley forces him to drink a plastic bottle filled with holy water and he blows up. He just shoves the bottle into his ex-friend's monster face and the dumb asshole opens wide and swallows twenty ounces of blessed water because I guess he has absolutely no self-control.
He acts like those stupid metal henchmen in The Clones Of Bruce Lee, who just mindlessly eat handfuls of poison grass after one of the titular clones of the world's greatest martial arts movie star forcefully shoves that bad stuff in their faces. There's no reason for them to eat the grass after it's jammed in their metal mouths, but they're so stupid they just can't help themselves. At least it was funny watching those metallic imbeciles chew their tainted cud. And this was after Charley learned from Peter Vincent that killing Gerri would save anybody she had sired, making them human once again. Charley didn't seem too broken up about killing his old pal Ed. At least in the 2011 remake, Charley learned that particular bit of vampire trivia after he killed Ed, so he didn't come across as such a heartless dickhead.
As for New Blood's iteration of Peter Vincent? He's easily the most disposable version yet, contributing essentially nothing to the plot in his perhaps five minutes of screen time. He's a drunken asshole who hangs out at a Romanian titty bar, and he gets attacked by "Evil" Ed in the filthy bathroom, but Peter Vincent fends him off with the giant crucifix tattoo (?!) that he proudly wears across his chest. The next time he pops up, he's wearing a fluffy pimp coat and has transformed the filthy bathroom into his vampire-proof lair, covering the walls with pages from his personal copy of the Holy Bible and telling Charley that he doesn't feel like leaving his lair to assist in the vampire killing festivities to come. because he'll be too busy catching the first horse and buggy out of town as soon as Mr. Sun rises in the east. So Charley sets off on his own to save his girlfriend Amy from the clutches of Gerri Dandridge at her ancient castle.
Gerri Dandridge is played by Jaime Murray, AKA the "English titty vampire" Lila Tournay from the series Dexter, now playing an actual
Apparently the first draft was written in a week by the hack who crapped out the script for Mirrors 2, and the movie itself was shot at a break-neck pace over three weeks in the bone-chilling cold during a harsh Romanian winter, and everybody on set was just miserable and wanted to go home. Nobody enjoyed the experience of making Fright Night 2: New Blood, and nobody enjoyed watching Fright Night 2: New Blood, so why was the fucking movie even made in the first place?
The final act of this movie is a complete mess. It's just nonsensical tripe. Charley arrives at Gerri's castle armed with two wooden stakes, and nothing else. He's come to kill the vampire queen and save his girlfriend, but she's already been turned by the nefarious once and future Countess Bathory because... wait, what? It was established earlier in the film that Bathory has been searching for the "chosen blood moon virgin" for centuries because bathing in her blood would make her human once again, but instead she transformed Amy, her long-awaited blood moon virgin, into a vampire to kill Charley, because if Amy kills the man she loves that would somehow not cure Gerri of her vampirism, but rather make her a fucking daywalker, which wasn't ever mentioned as part of the plan.
So Amy drinks Charley's blood in some subterranean bloodsucker bathhouse, and he immediately turns into a vampire, so he impales himself with one of his own wooden stakes to thwart Gerri's plans, and he dies. This causes Amy to begin to deteriorate as well for... some reason, and Gerri screams in frustration as her long awaited ascension to daywalking badass is thwarted...
...and that might have been an interesting, bittersweet ending, something completely unexpected for such a film, and a move I would have applauded, but this movie doesn't have the balls to pull off something that unpredictable, so instead of rolling credits, the movie just keeps mercilessly unfolding. Charley, very much undead-yet-not-dead-undead, gets back on his feet and pulls the stake out of his chest, because I guess this cretin was so stupid he actually missed his own heart during his noble attempt at self-sacrifice. Overjoyed at this fortuitous development, Gerri quickly subdues Charley and offers him up for Amy to kill, because she's not completely brain-dead and won't actually miss his heart with the wooden stake.
Then Peter Vincent just pops up out of nowhere, despite not really knowing or caring about Charley or Amy, and he impales Gerri with a giant collapsible silver stake, but he's also an inept buffoon so he misses Gerri's heart, and an incensed Gerri pointlessly transforms into a giant naked monster with the face of Rawhead Rex. Monster Gerri weakly strangles Peter Vincent while the ten thousand cuckoo clocks she keeps in her castle (she's a hoarder) simultaneously go off, signalling the arrival of sunrise, because that's how clocks work. Sensing his moment has finally arrived after spending the previous twenty minutes getting his ass kicked around a castle by a pair of toothy broads, Charley chatters his teeth loudly, emitting a high-pitched squeal (of course he does) that shatters all of the windows, bathing monster Gerri in harsh sunlight, and she melts into a giant puddle of raspberry jam.
Re-humanized, Charley and Amy walk out of the castle hand-in-hand- quipping with that smirking prick Peter Vincent because they all saved the day or some shit. Then and only then, after an unimaginably painful hour and thirty-five minutes of mind-numbing dross, do the end credits finally roll, ending my misery.
Nobody wanted this. Nobody in this rotten old world was clamoring for an in-name-only sequel to that shitty remake of 1985's beloved cult classic Fright Night, so why the fuck did it happen? Spite? Did some low-level executive at 20th Century Fox lose a fucking bet? This is such an ugly motion picture. Not only ugly in terms of aesthetics, which is absolutely true, because this is one repugnant, piss-yellow colored mess of a movie, but I'm really referring to the reasons behind making the movie itself. This is nothing more than a cynically conceived cash-in, an attempt to wring the last drops of viability out of a minor brand that had its heyday in the mid-1980's, and that's exactly what it feels like. Never mind the vampires; the movie itself is the real abomination, some misbegotten thing abhorred even by its own creators, who conjured this pathetic malformation only to line their own pockets.
At this rate, the next Fright Night movie is going to be footage of some hairless, obese pervert wearing a tattered taffeta cape with a set of cheap plastic vampire fangs in his drooling mouth, furiously masturbating in a squalid bus station toilet while a tortured muzak version of "We're In The Money" blares through a tinny overhead speaker for two hours. And maybe when that remake rolls around, we'll all be stupid enough to make it the number one highest-grossing blockbuster of all time. Take that, Avatar!
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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