Halloween II (The Search For More Money)

As long as I've been into the franchise, there were only three Halloween movies that mattered to me -- 1, 2, H20. The Laurie Strode Trilogy. I used to enjoy a couple of the sequels, like 4 and 5, but even before I turned on them, I always knew they were nothing compared to The Laurie Trilogy. That said, I always liked Halloween II the least of the three. When I'll think back on the movie, I'll always just feel a negative dislike, so I was surprised when I just rewatched it and found myself enjoying it. But I realized the problem -- I'll enjoy the first half hour, which is tying up the events of the first movie, but the movie comes to a screeching halt when all of the action moves to the hospital. To say it drags is an understatement. I find this section, which is most of the movie, to be interminable.

Even though John Carpenter and Debra Hill returned to script the movie, it's in a weaker director's hands, and it just always seemed to me like Carpenter and Hill didn't really know what to do with a follow-up. Michael Myers kills a lot of people he doesn't need to, but he also kills a lot of motherfucking time. Segments, which I suppose are meant to be suspenseful, just DRAG, and you don't care about most of the people featured, and the man behind Michael's mask in this movie (Dick Warlock) is the slowest Michael of all -- it's like watching slow-motion footage of a mime performing on the moon -- so the movie becomes even MORE sluggish seeming. It's torturous!

And it's just too similar to the first one -- albeit diluted and excised of what made the first one good -- that if you watch it too close to the first one, it becomes even more torturous for its similarity, especially the soundtrack. Yes, I know Carpenter's music is classic, but it's practically the same three pieces that plays throughout the movie, and here it's the same three pieces again. (The music in II is even worse, though, for sounding about as the same quality as the Atari game's music.)

It's a mistake to have Laurie be so incapacitated for the movie (it's practically a silent performance on Jamie Lee Curtis' part), and Loomis is already descending into parody. Rather than the driven Van Helsing of the first one, here he just sounds like an idiot or a lunatic in his obsession, ready to gun down or kill anything that he thinks looks close to Michael Myers. (Indeed, he gets Laurie's crush from the first film, Ben Tramer, killed for wearing a Michael-like mask. Laurie just can't catch a break. And, besides, Ben was swinging a trick-or-treat bag. Really, Loomis? You thought Michael was walking around Haddonfield with a trick-or-treat bag he was swingin' around? And you didn't notice that this "Michael" was a good two feet shorter? And walked FAST?!)

Then the action moves to the hospital, filled with characters we don't give a shit about, as we're forced to watch Michael pick them all off. Now, the first movie's victims seemed randomly picked, but there was a weird kind of logic to their selection. Michael saw and heard Laurie and little Tommy Doyle at his house, so that put them on his radar. He sees Laurie and her friends taunt him as he passes by. He kills a guy for his clothing, and Linda's boyfriend for possibly being an obstacle; he kills one dog for food and another because it was drawing attention. In Halloween II, he's just killing anybody who has the misfortune of being in the script, and it's just dull and becomes one of the lesser, routine slasher movies. (The most unnecessary kill of the entire movie is the teen on the phone at the beginning; there's absolutely no reason for Michael to kill her, and his springing into frame as if just launched from a jack-in-the-box looks silly as shit.) The movie is inconsistent with Laurie's state of recovery, Loomis is lost twiddling his thumbs until it's time to wrap the movie up, and characters have random Bouts of Stupid happen to them that makes Michael's job easier. Why is the hospital so damned empty anyway? Just Laurie, an infant and the kid with the razor in his mouth as patients, but way over-staffed in favor of Michael's kill list.

If there's one segment of the first movie I don't like, it's the scene(s) with Annie babysitting. They just linger on too long, her talking on the phone, locking herself in the laundry and so on, all while Michael walks back and forth in the background. It's meant to be suspenseful, but it's not interesting enough to maintain your interest and you're just bored. Well, Halloween II is practically that scene stretched for an entire movie. Take the scene with the security guard, where we're following his every move as he's supposed to be investigating the source of the dead phone-line. (We're even treated to him searching the dumpster -- searching the dumpster? -- and a ZINGING JUMP SCARE as a cat jumps out at him. The old cat jumping out and scaring a character/not scaring the audience was a cliche even in the '40s.)

One last thing: the character of Jimmy Lloyd, who takes an interest in Laurie even though she's a teenager and he's well out of college and it's OK. We know nothing about this guy, but we're meant to care about him. He's also a total bonehead and later on gives Laurie's location away to Michael by passing out and falling onto the horn of the car Laurie's hiding in. That's the last we see of old Jimmy in the movie, folks. Well, unless you've seen the movie on TV with the alternate ending where he joins Laurie in the ambulance and a budding romance is hinted at. That's weird and all, but not as weird as Halloween 4 picking up on this alternate/deleted scene and having Danielle Harris' Jamie Lloyd be the daugher of Laurie and Jimmy, something you'd NEVER know if you hadn't seen the alternate ending or heard about it. Why'd they do that? Reminds me of the way Superman Returns was built off of the then-unseen Richard Donner cut of Superman II.

TO BE CONTINUED...

John Carpenter's Halloween (aka "The Good One")

In the 1990s, I was fairly obsessed with the Halloween franchise. I owned the tapes, watched them a bunch. I made my mom reserve this lifesize cardboard cutout Michael Myers VHS display from Blockbuster, which she will probably still complain about what a pain it was fitting it in our car if reminded about it. I had a pretty pricey Don Post Michael Myers mask and went trick or treating as Michael Myers quite a few times. (I did my best George Wilbur zombie waltz. Why Wilbur? No particular reason. Wilbur was the latest Myers, it's not like he was my favorite.)

I was never as into the Halloween series as I was the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but I was still snobbish at that point about the Friday the 13ths and those types of movies, and thought Halloween stood well above those. The franchise had been in a dry spell when I got into them. It was a pretty lengthy amount of time between Part 5 and Part 6, and I remember being SO excited to see Part 6 in the theater and just sitting there in horror at how goddamn terrible it was. But, for as bad as that movie is, my love for the franchise remained. Believe it or not, even worse entries would come along and finish the job that not even the truly terrible Part 6 could manage -- kill my love for the franchise. Kill it dead. Kill it to the point where I not only feel nothing for the franchise, but I became a bigger Jason Voorhees fan over time. (Yes, at this point, I'd probably pop in a turd like Jason Takes Manhattan over even the best of the Halloween franchise.)

So, the Halloween franchise hasn't been on my mind for a while. But I recently picked up the producer's cut of Halloween 6 on Blu-ray because I've heard so much about it over the years (and didn't care enough to sit through the bootlegs that had been the only option to see it until now). And then I watched H20, which I used to think highly of, but the vicious killer known as Shit Sequel has even diminished my love for that one. (And Shit Sequel has had quite a way with the Halloween franchise. Quite a way.) I used to love these movies, think so highly of them, have such fun with them. With the pain and embarrassment of the remake a fading memory, could I again find enjoyment in the original movies? So, I decided to revisit the franchise. Would I feel a flicker of my past feelings? Would I manage to not enjoy the movies even more? Let's find out in part 1 of a 10-part entry.

JOHN CARPENTER'S HALLOWEEN (None of this "Halloween 1978" shit. There's only one first Halloween movie, and that's John Carpenter's.)

The classic, the one with the most genuine scares. Being a classic, being synonymous with the actual holiday, it's one of the most-killed horror movies, so over-familiarity puts some shackles on it. It's not the deepest movie, but it's good at what it does, it features some iconic performances and some fun, relatable teen characters. (I feel like the only fan who appreciates Nancy Loomis' droll performance as the jaded Annie.) Carpenter is good at squeezing out suspense, but squeeze it he does -- there's a couple of segments that go on just a little too long, in my opinion, but not enough to damage the movie. (No, no. That's a job left to the sequels.)

Nick Castle's Michael Myers is also the best Myers. He's slow, as the role requires for whatever reason, but he moves quickly when he needs to. His Michael feels the most "normal," seeming angry and frustrated, just lashing out in attack, rather than some of the other Michael's calculated robotic movements. Castle's movements and body language makes for a Michael you can be scared of, not one you laugh at because his victim is two states over by the time he crosses the street.

I also think Donald Pleasence comes across best in this movie. Loomis here is all determination and urgency, but also a bundle of jittery nerves. Everything we know about Michael Myers comes from Carpenter's creepy yet dressed up speeches made by Loomis, and Pleasence always knows how to deliver those and more. The "Loomis Speeches" here are effective at how they convey Michael's viciousness, but also Loomis' terror at failing to ever get through to or hold onto his patient. A lot of the sequels don't quite get the Loomis Speech right again, they just become watered down riffs of his dialogue here, and they're never quite as effective and they really push Loomis and his whole Loomis Speeching into self-parody, which unfortunately backwashes even onto this one.

One last thing I'd like to say is that when I just rewatched this movie, I chose to watch it on VHS. The coloring is murky -- sometimes TOO damn dark to really see anything -- but, man, it really helps sell the atmosphere of the movie. When Laurie's walking around Haddonfield, it looks like a grey, gloomy fall day. When I've seen this movie on DVD or on TV, it's a crisp, restored version that makes Haddonfield seem constantly sunny. The crisp picture is nice and all, especially being able to see more moments of Michael looming (I never knew until the DVD that he's staring at Laurie and her friends as he drives by them), but not at the expense of atmosphere.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Pinhead will return in...Hellraiser: Judgement

News has recently hit of a new Hellraiser sequel getting underway, titled Hellraiser Judgment. And against my better judgment, pun intended, I'm actually excited. The Hellraiser franchise is one of my top favorite of the horror franchises, and while it has had more downs than ups, but I'm always suckered back into it with a new sequel.

The main reason I'm a bit more hopeful for this one is due to Revelations writer Gary Tunnicliffe returning as writer and, this time, director. I know Revelations is a controversial movie amongst Hellraiser fans, and while it IS flawed and smells of quickly-made-for-the-sake-of-keeping-ownership-of-the-property, I do think it's one of the better sequels in terms of capturing Hellraiser's themes and style. After so many sequels that were unrelated scripts rewritten to incorporate Pinhead and the box, Revelations was a sequel intended to be a Hellraiser, so it actually seemed like a Hellraiser. (To be honest, I thought it was the best Hellraiser since Inferno, which is another controversial opinion. I hope to write more about Inferno in a later post.)

Tunnicliffe has had a long association with the franchise, and obviously has a good grasp of what it's about (which has long seemed to puzzle a lot of writers) and what it's capable of, and he has a respect and knowledge of the material. (I especially liked the histories he wrote for the characters on the packaging of the old NECA figures.)

One downside so far is that Doug Bradley has turned down the chance to play Pinhead again. They're going for yet another new actor (not the same replacement from Revelations), which makes me fear that if there are ever any more sequels, it will become a revolving door of Pinheads. As iconic as Pinhead is, I feel that in that case, they should consider creating a new starring Cenobite, or perhaps have some variation of Pinhead, but one that isn't meant to be Bradley's Elliot Spencer. (Another piece of exciting news about Judgment is that Heather Langenkamp will star in it. Now, imagine if she was playing a female variation of Pinhead.)

At this stage, when the classic franchises have been dormant for so long and original series wiped out by failed remakes, I'm kind of glad that a new old-time Hellraiser is being made.

Will The New Freddy Please Stand Up?

Who should play the new Freddy Krueger?

With news of (another) A Nightmare on Elm Street remake hitting, fans of the franchise have been speculating and arguing with one another about just what approach the new movie should take after 2010's remake flopped.

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise has some of the more passionate fans I've encountered over the years I've been part of the horror fandom. Face it, the Nightmare movies provide a lot more to be passionate about than most of the slasher movies at the time -- from character to plot to imaginative dream sequences to mythology building and motivation for the monster. For whatever reason, if you were a horror fan during Freddymania in the '80s, it's a franchise that made its mark on you. Freddy was inescapable.

Freddy has been depicted in several forms -- toasted tormentor in the shadows, sadistic clown, cackling goofball -- and there's a devoted fan for each one. Some fans love Elm Street in all of its incarnations. Fans of the Jason movies are a jokey, rowdy, fun-lovin' bunch that matches the tone of that franchise. Michael Myers fans are a somber bunch who are picking up the pieces of their heart that's been shattered so many times by that franchise's absurd turns. Freddy fans, we're serious about this stuff. We love it.

But there's a new wave of fans who accuse a lot of us longtimers of being stuck in the past. (Maybe if you're introduction to Freddy is Freddy VS Jason, you shouldn't be dictating where the franchise should go.) For a lot of us longtime fans, it was difficult to see the original being remade in 2010. Unlike the Hammer films of the '60s, which logically remade those old Universal Monster movies that had been limited by a lack of color and censorship, there was just no real reason to remake the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. And it was right for the fans to be apprehensive about the remake being in the hands of Michael Bay's company Platinum Dunes, which specializes in taking the horror movies of yesterday we loved and turn them into Xtreme Mountain Dew ad music videos. Those of us who didn't want the remake, who didn't like it, have been accused of turning away new fans of the franchise, but I think the lifeless, pointless remake was guilty enough of not bringing in new fans.

I'm anti-remake, period, but Hollywood's going to do what it's going to do. I actually had hopes for Jackie Earle Haley in the role of Freddy. He's not only a good actor, but after spending so many years out of the spotlight, he's a performer who's hungry to take whatever on. I thought it was pretty brave of him to take the role of Freddy so soon after having critical acclaim for Little Children. (I probably would have talked him out of it if I was his manager.) But the remake did him no favors. In an attempt to prove that the new Freddy was "serious," they stripped him of ANY personality. No, I don't want that buffoonish Freddy who dresses like the Wicked Witch and makes jokes so bad that Austin Powers would cringe, but even before Freddy became that clown, he was known for his personality. That's one of the several things that made him stand out from the silent baboons like Jason or Michael. Freddy has spark, he's a live wire. The entire 2010 remake was a flat, dull, pointless exercise, a sinking ship that took Haley down with it. If he had been allowed to cut loose, he could have made a major impact on that movie, been its sole spark of life.

There ARE fans who refuse to accept anybody other than Robert Englund playing the role. As far as I'm concerned, there's no real reason why Englund couldn't play the part again. I think he has a couple of more Freddy performances in him. He's already shown so many sides of the character and reinvented the role for New Nightmare. But I've gotten the impression that Englund's kind of glad to have Freddy in his rearview mirror. And, realistically, you know Hollywood's not going to bother with him. But, Englund's made his mark. He's played the part to the best of his ability and proven he's the definitive Freddy Krueger -- he's the Sean Connery to which every other actor who takes the role will be measured to. Englund played Freddy in eight movies, a TV series and countless promotional specials -- in a world that can barely get the same actor to ever play Batman more than a couple of times, that's a hell of a run.

The new remake, if that's what they're going for, could be a complete shot-for-shot Xerox of the original, but in Hollywood's mind, they'd still be under the impression it's a "new" movie. They'll probably want a new Freddy. Other than his personality, one of the things that stuck out about Freddy WAS the way that Englund returned to the role so many times. (Has any horror actor ever returned to the same part as much as he has? I don't even think Christopher Lee played Dracula as many times.) There was even a revolving door of actors for the Universal Monsters. So, as much as I might be one of those oh, so annoying fans stuck in the past who wants Englund back, I acknowledge that it would make no sense to try and restart the franchise with someone who might only be able to do a couple of movies, opposed to someone new who could do several. (One option Hollywood could take is to get Englund and have it be a motion-capture performance; Freddy could be depicted in a way that's much more surreal and monstrous than make-up could allow. But I'm opposed to motion-capture, to be honest. It robs performers of their talents, life and performance by painting a cartoon over them.) So, there's no doubt they'll be after a new Freddy Krueger.

I've put a ridiculous amount of thought into who I think would be a good, new Freddy. I think Freddy needs to be dark, menacing, and have a sense of humor. Not the moronic cartoon humor of Freddy's Dead, but the cruel, sadistic humor. The taunting. He needs to be merciless, he needs to exploit his victims' fears as much as he can, and he needs to savor it. He can't be turning victims into a balloon, pop them with his glove, and be like "He was full of hot air, HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" No! We need Freddy to be dark and scary again. The burnt bastard needs to go back into the shadows. He needs to be intimidating, genuinely scary, sinister, vicious. He needs to be more quiet, deliberate in what he says. He shouldn't be Schwarzenegger, firing off more bad one-liners than bullets. He should be a creep and you should want to hate his guts and want for the protagonist to prevail.

I kept visualizing the way I thought Freddy should be depicted until my brain formed someone who I had seen play nasty bastards and who I think would fit the bill. I wasn't aware of the actor's name, but now that I looked him up, his name's a bit too unintentionally cutesy to cast him as Freddy (though I imagine marketing departments would have fun with it), but I think he'd do a great job: Burn Gorman.

Gorman is a heavily active actor with a Shakespearean background, but not too well known; I'm not familiar with Torchwood, but with that and Game of Thrones, he at least seems to be comfortable with geeky stuff and knows how to handle an association with it. I think he's unfamiliar enough in America that, if the movie failed, it wouldn't really hurt his career, especially back in England. If the movie would be a success, if he would be successful in the part, it would get him a bit of a boost in America, but I don't think it would so negatively color his resume and reduce the amount of dramatic work he could do in his home country.

The first interactive horror game...no, not Brainscan

In the early and mid '90s, virtual reality was everyone's dream, the big technological trend. My God, could you imagine a piece of equipment that could make you feel like you were transported to different locales, different time periods? Or, the big one, equipment and the programming that could place you inside your favorite TV show or movie? It's the 1990s, the future, and the future has always promised two things: flying cars and virtual reality! The future is now!

I think it was that kind of thinking that led to the early '90s "motion picture video game" style of video games. Popular on the PC, which was quickly forced into every home "because it's the future!," motion picture video games never really impressed people. They were touted as the next step in video games -- the bridge towards placing you in a video game, like VR! -- but they were hardly video games! A majority of them made you sit through clips and told you what buttons to push and a little meter in the corner reacted to it. Instead of placing you within the video, it was basically the video game equivalent of Simon -- you had to punch in the correct pattern of buttons or else it would be "game" over. This wasn't the future! This sucked! And a lot of the motion picture games would lag as they loaded, so they were nearly impossible to "play." (An example: there was a noir-based shooting game called "Who Shot Johnny Rock?" which required you to react quickly to hidden assassins. Problem was, you'd recognize an assassin, scroll your target over to aim, and the damn video would freeze as it loaded, favoring the assassin who then shot you and then game over. Fun, right?)

To a young kid who grew up on 8-bit Nintendo and loved video games, the Sega CD's arrival was exciting. This is it! A player's total immersion into video games! This was pre-internet, folks, so nobody knew what a flop the system would be. Sega CD was damned pricey and I couldn't buy one and none of my friends had one. But did it flop -- it debuted in late '92 and was in mark-down aisles by '94. How do I know '94? Well, I remember watching the movie Brainscan, thinking how cool it looked to have a totally immersive video game -- that came on CD, not a big, clunky gray cartridge -- one that was like real life, not some video game about an Italian plumber who eats mushrooms and kills turtles. Then I remembered...the Sega CD. Yeah, the Sega CD looked like Brainscan, it looked like the future, the ultimate in gaming experience. Soon afterwards, I bought a Sega CD and a ton of video games (because they were practically all in bargain bins.) Finally! So long, onion-ring collecting hedgehogs! Hello, a video game experience that's so intense it blurs reality and gaming! The future was here...

...and it sucked. The Sega CD's massive disappointment and suckiness is well-documented, of course, but in addition to those "motion video" video games and their lagging I talked about above, even their traditional side-scrolling games were disappointing. Games like Bram Stoker's Dracula or Cliffhanger had such clunky controls that they were impossible to play. Those motion video games were either pointless or dumb or so nonsensical that they weren't worth the effort. (And that's not even touching upon how many of them had local car dealership commerical production value and/or -- usually and -- the acting caliber of an Unsolved Mysteries-type reenactment.) But one game always interested me. One game always stood out as not only being interesting to me, but actually fun: Dracula Unleashed, which the packaging boasted as "the first interactive gothic horror game."

Dracula Unleashed is meant to be a sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The plot involves the American Alexander Morris arriving in turn-of-the-century London to investigate the suspicious death of his brother, Quincy. (Quincy would be the guy played by The Rocketeer in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula film -- the one who died while fatally wounding Dracula with a Bowie knife.) Alexander's investigation is slowed down when he meets a woman, Annisette, and begins a relationship with her. He continues to make contact with those who knew Quincy -- familiar characters like the Harkers and Arthur Holmwood -- when a series of grisly murders begin to occur around London. Murders...of the vampire kind! It looks like Dracula's back, and it spooks the ones surrounding Alexander, impeding his investigation, all while he's swept up in the mystery which involves Annisette.

The way you play the game is you control each of Alexander's moves. Each distance he travels is measured by time, which is crucial -- arrive at someone's house too late, you're likely to be turned away by their servants and therefore could miss out on a critical piece of information. Arrive at the newspaper stand too late, you might miss out on a piece of the puzzle. Arrive at a shady part of town too late? You might find a vampire biting a game over into your neck. Not only is it important to visit particular locations at particular times, but the game has a whole variety of objects you'll need to gather and have in hand to unlock certain parts of video and advance the story. There's a whole variety of ways to screw up in this game, but I find it an overall enjoyable game that's not frustratingly unplayable like a lot of these "movie" video games that the Sega CD and PC loved.

The acting is surprisingly decent as far as these games go -- it can be a bit theatrical at times, but not terrible -- and I think they did a good enough job on the sets and wardrobe -- I can't imagine the budget for this being all that high, but they make the most of it. The makers create a good atmosphere that evokes the feeling of a Victorian-set horror tale -- and I'm a bit of a sucker for horror set in that period, they go hand in hand to me since all of the classics are based on novels from that period. (So, it's a bit of a disappointment to me that I couldn't get into Showtime's series Penny Dreadful.) There was a company several years ago who released the game onto DVD, and it's nice to have in good video quality (as well as extras such as a making of and outtakes). I prefer to play the game on Sega CD, though -- it's easier to navigate and access the items the character carries.

I still think this game is fun, with a lot of neat little details that you'll appreciate if you're a fan of Dracula or horror stories set in the time period, and it's a clever continuation of the Dracula story. It's a game that I still like to haul out and play every now and then and people should be a little more open-minded about it (and the Sega CD system in general).

So Cool, Brewster

Fright Night is one of my favorite horror movies. Its premise is extremely clever, and it's just a well made and filmed movie at a time when a lot of horror movies didn't have love put into them because they were copycatting a Jason or Michael.

The movie has a lot of elements of classic Dracula or vampire stories, but completely contemporizes them. Main antagonist Jerry Dandrige follows the typical Dracula type template -- he can be smooth, he can be charming, but he's still dangerous -- and brings him into the '80s, into the city. Farewell 19th century, farewell backlots mimicking London. But here's part one of what makes the movie gets really creative...the vampire is facing people who are well-versed in how to deal with him: horror fans. Part 2? That the horror fans, when every adult fails to help them, turn to a failed horror actor for help. That's just a stroke of genius to me, and writer-director Tom Holland has said that the movie only lingered in his mind until he came up with Peter Vincent, and after that flash of brilliance, the entire movie wrote itself. The characters and movie are aware of movies and genre convention, but not to the annoying degree of something like Scream, to where everything is a reference and it's really putting down the genre and has characters who think they're superior to typical genre characters, but fall into the same trap as those they ridicule.

People who criticize this movie think the premise is "cheesy" or "unrealistic," when you just need to go with the flow. You have to keep in mind the ages of the protagonists. At 16 years old, what choices do you have? Charley already tried to get his mom to help, but she's self-involved. He went to the police, they wouldn't listen. In his movie-obsessed mind, the only option left was someone who had done decades worth of fake vampire hunting, who had enough experience to know what to do and what they're up against.

It's a well made movie. The casting is great, the performances are good, everyone is likable. It's one of the rare horror movies that is comedic, but still scary. (I like to try to avoid calling it a "horror comedy," because that detracts from just how scary it actually is.) Honestly, while I like a lot of vampire stories, to me they're not really the scariest, but Fright Night has a lot of imaginative vampire designs that I actually DO find scary. When Jerry goes monstrous or how Evil Ed ends up and especially Amy with the shark mouth? That's scarier than that whole Lost Boys look, with their Klingon foreheads, which most vampire movies and shows have stuck with since. (Some people associate the look with Buffy, but Buffy ripped it off of The Lost Boys.)

For a lot of people, one character stands out. And for as much as this movie has going for it, I think without this character, without this specific piece of casting, the movie would be remembered less. That character is, of course, Stephen Geoffreys' Evil Ed. Where Charley Brewster is meant to be a horror fan, he kind of represents to me the type of casual fan who's a bit of a dabbler, who likes horror, but his attention can be swayed elsewhere. He's a "normal" fan, who will probably eventually abandon his being a fan and anything associated to that fandom -- including friends -- for a shot of "normalcy." Evil Ed is the bigger horror fan. Look at his room. This kid breathes horror, bleeds horror. He's the one who helps Charley further understand vampire rules, he's the one who impresses Peter Vincent with his knowledge of Peter's old movies. He hears the grisly newscasts about the murders and see Charley's descent into obsession over the possibility of Jerry being a vampire -- his town, his life, is turning into a horror movie all around him and he loves it. Evil's the die-hard fan who's often the point of ridicule, who knows he's not seen as "normal."

Evil Ed's seen as a nerd and an outcast and a weirdo -- look at the nickname he's earned. And he puts up this front about not believing Charley. While he enjoys the idea of his life turning into a horror movie, I don't think he's quite as wicked or "evil" as people in the movie and in the fandom think he is. He wants to think there are creatures out there in the night, but the idea still frightens him. He's still obviously scared deep down. Look how panicked and desperate he is when Jerry's after him. He gets cornered and bursts into tears knowing he's dead. But Jerry, in the smooth talking charm of Dracula, offers him power. A power Evil thought he'd never have, the power to be better than the "normal" folks who torment and ridicule him. The power of one of the monsters from the movies he loves. A power that can show those who have judged him what evil really can mean. He'll become the monster he's always been accused of being. His life now completely a horror movie, with him as its featured monster, he really lets loose.

We've seen a dozen mopey vampires in movies or on TV -- Jerry included -- but in Evil Ed we have a vampire who really loves being a vampire and is going to use it to his full advantage. It's interesting to me that the movie takes a character who was good, who was normal, and turns them into an antagonist. Unfortunately, once Evil Ed is injured by Peter, he drops out of a big chunk of the movie, until his one last scene at the end. And the movies loses a lot of life. The quirky energy, the manic glee brought to the character and movie by Geoffreys really energizes the movie and you don't quite realize just how much until he takes an absence. Geoffreys is such a good match for the character and gives him such unique life it's hard to believe he was under the impression he'd be playing Charley. I didn't care much for the remake, but was surprised that Colin Farrell often expressed how much he liked the original in interviews, even singling out Stephen Geoffreys and his performance as Evil Ed.

And, of course, the movie ends with a hint that Evil Ed has survived to terrorize another day. There's only been rumors and speculation, but most people seem to think he would have been the primary antagonist of Fright Night 2. I know the comics had this bizarre storyline of Evil Ed returning and running a nightclub, but...yeah, those comics were nonsense. Fright Night 2 itself ended up being a really weak and forgettable movie, a cheap, lazy and half-hearted flip of the first one. So I think it's better that Evil Ed and Geoffreys were left untainted by inferior follow-ups. (Tom Holland says he had written a spec script for Fright Night 2 that the studio nixed because they wanted someone new...and cheaper. I'm really curious what Holland would have done with a sequel, but he sidestepped the question when I asked.)

Horror fans seem to generally think positively about Fright Night. At the time, it was successful at the box office. Yet I always thought it kind of slipped between the cracks. (So I was surprised that it was deemed big enough to remake.) The Lost Boys -- which Fright Night is constantly pitted against by horror fans -- certainly seems more well known. Even feeling like Fright Night was a little under the radar, I felt a flicker of hope that maybe they'd make a couple of figures from the movie once I saw Lost Boys figures coming out. You could do vampire Jerry, Evil, shark-mouth Amy. But...no. Evil Ed's good enough to put on T-shirts, but not have a figure?! So it again falls to fans to make their own figures. Here's the custom Evil Ed I had made:

Boxed, front and back.

Before and after vamping out.

Clarifying a point from my previous post (Freddy's Revenge)

I was bothered by something in my previous post about Freddy's Revenge, when I mention screenwriter David Chaskin's interviews at the time the film was released. I couldn't remember his exact words, but I knew he said his inspiration for the script was the feeling of a bad drug trip. I dug out the Fangoria issue (#50) and scanned this portion of the interview.