FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2 (1988) Review
Ah. That awkward moment when you kinda dig a movie you know you’re supposed to just hate on principle. Yeah, spoilers; I like Fright Night Part 2, what can I say? I mean, look… there’s a roller-blading vampire and it opens with a literal ‘previously on’. It may very well be dumb as shit but… c’mon! That’s awesome. Why don’t more sequels do this? Taking the ‘bigger=better’ approach to sequels, Fright Night Part 2 is a silly extension of the original, by no means integral or inspired, but it does offer a similar thrill and finds plenty of interesting and new ways to approach the narrative. We’re basically in the same scenario, only this time we forgo any pretense of mystery around there actually being vampires (makes sense, we know this already anyway, after all) and instead dive headfirst into the action. Unlike Tom Holland’s excellent 1985 original, Fright Night Part 2 doesn’t take its time setting up the premise and actually subverts a lot of our expectations going in.
We begin with our protagonist, young Charlie Brewster, who is now a college student and has convinced himself — thanks to therapy and his new girlfriend — that the events of the previous movie were in fact a form of psychosis brought on by the trauma he suffered encountering supposed serial killer, Jerry Dandridge. At first, it appears that the movie is going to pull something of a reversal on our two leads — Charlie and the other returning character, Roddy McDowell’s ever-brilliant Peter Vincent — where Charlie refuses to believe in the ‘creatures of the night’ and Vincent must now convince him of what’s really going on. However, the movie chucks this out almost immediately, which is something of a blessing as it essentially allows Part 2 to revel almost entirely in the silly makeup effects and monster antics of its gang of villainous bloodsuckers without suffering sequel deja-vu.
The movie also smartly recognizes that there are now two giant holes in proceedings, the first in the shape of Evil Ed and the second in the shape of Chris Sarandon’s antagonist, both of whom were offed by the last films closing credits (although… Evil Ed could have returned, the original does sorta hint that he might still be alive). Instead of trying to fill these holes with cut-and-paste copies, Fright Night Part 2 opts to merely fill out the cast with a shit tonne more vampires, each of whom gets their own quirky little vibe and — while they’re hardly the most fleshed out and engaging of bad guys — brings something interesting to the table (special mention here for Brian Thompson, who plays vampire Bozworth, an actor I know for portraying a different vampire in a different vampire-centric franchise, Buffy, and whose presence here makes me laugh every single time I watch it). Of course, this new gang can’t quite fill the shoes of Sarandon, who was such an integral part of what makes the original work, but they remain fun to watch, even if they are lesser.
The plot itself is fairly simplistic; Dandridge’s sister (vampires have siblings?) shows up to enact revenge on Charlie and Peter Vincent for murdering her brother (vampires have siblings?) and proceeds to toy with them, biting Charlie so that he slowly begins to turn — something that is wildly inconsistent with the rules laid out in the original, but who the fuck cares? — and, for reasons unexplained, um… taking over Peter Vincent’s role as the host of late-night horror movie showcase, Fright Night. Quite why a vampire would feel the need to do this I do not know — perhaps it really is as petty and simplistic as ‘you killed my brother, so I'm gonna take your show from you, old man!’ — but then, making sense isn’t exactly what Fright Night Part 2 is all that interested in doing. Instead, the movie seems content to jump from horror sequence to horror sequence, and I’ll be honest, I enjoy watching it just as much as the movie appears to enjoy showing it. Tom Holland has said he wants to make a third movie that ignores the sequel, suggesting that he isn’t much of a fan, however incoming director Tommy Lee Wallace — who also made the super underappreciated and absolutely brilliant Halloween III: Season of the Witch (y’know, the Halloween movie that doesn’t feature Michael Myers…) — does a fairly decent job of a) aping the style set out in the original, and b) ensuring that everything is fun and exciting.
It also manages to avoid simply falling into retread territory by adding a whole ‘Charlie-is-becoming-a-vampire’ subplot that, while totally out of line with the established lore of the original, is interesting and it’s fun to see the character taken in this direction. There’s also something incredibly sinister about our villain’s plan here, which she lays out to Charlie in a seductively creepy manner at one point; essentially she has turned him into an immortal creature of the night so that she can torture him… forever. That’s fucking horrible, and perhaps the movie could’ve made a little more of this.
Sadly, while the film has plenty of fun with its monster-make-up (there’s a hilarious bowling sequence) and a lot of silly little moments that are as campy as they are stupid, and therefore I can’t help but fall for, it does lack the original’s biting meta-satire and knowing winks at the audience. While Holland’s Fright Night expertly commented on horror fandom and on the genre and the industry in general — even going so far as to feature some excellently made and pitch-perfect Hammer-esque knock-offs — here we lose a lot of that. My guess would be that a huge part of that is down to Holland’s absence. The film does sort of try to ape that element, but it does very little with it, and we would have to wait till Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson set their sights on horror movie sequels with 1997’s Scream 2 before we got to see this particular aspect of the genre properly deconstructed.
Still, for me, there’s a lot I enjoy about Fright Night Part 2. It’s not a patch on Holland’s movies, but then very few films are. While Fright Night (1985) remains an absolute must-see classic of the vampire subgenre, and one of the best examples of 80s cheese, gloopy effects, and wonderfully meta-horror comedy, its sequel is almost exactly the kinda movie the first one is lovingly poking fun at. That’s not strictly a bad thing, anyone who knows me knows I love a bit of campy schlock anyway, so for me this movie delivers entertainment value in abundance. It’s not great, but it’s most definitely not bad, and it fucking blows that there isn’t a decent release of this to add to my collection. I would buy the absolute shit out of it. Is anyone up for a double bill? 3/5.
