That Night

Leave a comment

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Fright Night before.  It seems that it may have been on one of those trans-Atlantic flights where you exit the plane not quite sure what took place during those missing hours on earth.  I do recall that I had the hazy idea I wanted to see the movie under more controlled circumstances—with my feet on the ground and no pressurized cabin anywhere in sight.  It is certainly a passable vampire movie.  Tom Holland’s first as director.  Ironically, just the weekend before I’d had a hankering and rewatched Child’s Play, which he directed a few years after Fright Night.  I hadn’t realized they had the same director.  In any case, since the movie is now forty years old I’m not going to worry too much about spoilers.  Besides, I’d forgotten most of it since my last viewing, which was thirty or fewer years ago.

Copyright HAG ©2008

Charley Brewster and his mother live next door to a fixer-upper.  Charley, who’s a fan of the campy television show Fright Night, keeps getting distracted from his girlfriend Amy by goings on next door.  He immediately and correctly deduces that their new neighbor, Jerry Dandrige, is a vampire.  But nobody believes him, not even Amy.  As a teenager, he’s rather helpless and can’t take on the vampire alone.  When Amy sees their friend “Evil” has been transformed, she believes and eventually the unemployed star of Fright Night, Peter Vincent, styled “the vampire killer,” also joins them.  They have to stop Dendrige before Amy ends up a vampire forever.  There are a few good frights and the story still feels rather fresh.  The weird thing, it seemed to me, was the long, lingering reaction shots of Vincent (Roddy McDowall).  The pacing felt a bit off, but otherwise it was a fine movie.

The name Peter Vincent combines the two stars Holland wanted for the role, Peter Cushing or Vincent Price.  The campy performance of this character balances the body count and gore.  Although it involves teens, it landed an R rating, almost considered necessary for any serious horror movie.  The movie poster also makes it look like this might be more comedic than it is.  It has a distinctly 1980s horror film feel to it.  Now this is going to make me feel old, but I’m starting to be able to discern the differences between seventies and eighties horror films by remembering what those decades were like.  I don’t know when I saw Fright Night before, but I’m glad I saw it again.  And I’m keeping an eye on the neighbors, just in case.

Drumheller Drama

3 Comments

Those who’ve participated in the great drive out west—if you’ve done it you know what I mean—have passed through the range of dinosaurs. Actually, dinosaurs can be found here in the east; New Jersey once had a reputation of the home of the hadrosaurus, before an even larger beast took over the state. In my native Pennsylvania the occasional dinosaur footprint would be found. But to really see the dinosaurs, the west is best. In Makoshika State Park you can find triceratops skulls right out on the ground. You can find plenty of Christians as well. Ironically, we’ve advertised to the world that Christians and dinosaurs don’t mix, but, in fact, they can get along just fine. In a BBC story my wife sent me, one of Canada’s great western dinosaur reserves, Drumheller, Alberta, has a potential clash between sauropods and savior. Seen from one angle, at least. The story by Tom Holland points out conflicting wills for an entrepreneur who wants to build a dinosaur display and a long-established passion play that occupies the space he wants.

Dinos

News doesn’t get read without some measure of drama, so Holland pits the dinosaurs against the Christians. What seems to me, however, as the real issue is entrepreneurial expansion versus what seems like an arcane melodrama, the reenactment of Jesus’ death. Ironically, the greater part of North America was colonized by Christians of various descriptions. Many of them established their culture in various ways across the landscape. As a culture, it wasn’t always belligerent, and sometimes even beneficial. Passion plays, once upon a time, were considered the mark of culture. Jesus, I’m sure, knew nothing of dinosaurs but would have had no problem with them, I contend, if he had.

The issue here is less about science versus religion as it is about cash versus culture. Even Ahab turned his face to the wall when he couldn’t have the land that he wanted. If someone else got there first and made a recurring shrine, does capitalism have the right to slough it out of the way? I love dinosaurs. I’ve driven many miles out the way to see dinosaur trackways far beyond the trodden path. These are but shadows of footprints cast millions of years ago. Both dinosaurs and Jesus have their place in our hallowed past. While pictures of Jesus riding dinosaurs may well be over the top, the message perhaps rings true: there’s no inherent conflict here. When someone wants to make quick cash, however, there will always be sacrificial victims involved.