Fright Night Part 2 (1988)
Fright Night Part 2 is a follow-up to the 1985 cult hit, Fright Night (naturally), and by just about every measure, it’s a disappointment. Here we find the same protagonist, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), as a college student no longer believing in the existence of vampires after three years of therapy. Also helping him overcome his supposed fantasies is his new girlfriend and fellow student at the college, Alex (Traci Lind). However, things get dicey in their relationship when Charley gets seduced through his dreams by a sexy vampire posing as a performance artist named Regine Dandridge (Julie Carmen), the sister of the vampire that Jerry defeated in the first film. Regine wants revenge in the form of turning Charley into her wicked vampire servant until the end of time. Knowing he’s in trouble if he doesn’t get help, he again goes to the only source who will believe him, b-movie horror host and vampire slayer, Peter Vincent. However, Regine is cunning and powerful, and she’s brought along a gang of fellow vampires to protect her.
This gorier and less amusing effort is directed and co-written by Tommy Lee Wallace, a longtime friend and collaborator with John Carpenter and prior writer-director of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and future director of the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It. The original’s writer-director-creator, Tom Holland, declined to come back for the sequel so that he could pursue making Child’s Play. What’s missing is wit and inspiration, eschewing the themes of being a misfit in life for more rudimentary horror-based tropes about combating evil for evil’s sake. Tom Holland, an actor himself, worked very closely with his actors to draw out their natural personalities in a way in which would complement the script, while Tommy Lee Wallace reportedly barely dealt with the actors, concentrating more on the effects work and technical side, letting the actors choose their own paths on how to play their roles without much input. While it brings back the two main characters from Fright Night to star, and it does contain the same composer in Brad Fiedel for the score, it feels too different in tone and tempo from the first effort to qualify this as a successful successor.
Tonally, Fright Night Part 2 feels passionless and without much inspiration beyond setting up more mayhem as a follow-up, choosing instead to try to mix things up in a similar plot, with Charley being the one tho needs to be convinced by Peter Vincent that vampires are real (somehow, the tenacious boy who refused to give in when everyone around him thought he was crazy gets convinced by a rather lackluster psychiatrist that he was all along, despite actually gaining all the evidence he needed, and getting all the naysayers around him to be convinced as well), and also being the one in the relationship that needs to be saved by his girlfriend. Other than that, there’s not so much here to come back to enjoy, as it not only falls short of its predecessor in terms of old-fashioned b-movie laughs and 80s-tinged charm, but it also has the unenviable distinction of following two of the most well-loved vampire films among genre fans in The Lost Boys and Near Dark. Julie Carmen does what she can to be alluring and, sometimes, scary, but her Regina falls far short of the fun of seeing Chris Sarandon perform a similar role in the first go-around, partially because her character is so ill-defined that her personality entirely changes from scene to scene. It also doesn’t help that she has to compete for screen time with her entourage of three vampire subordinates who are played in rather one-note fashion (one’s an androgynous roller-skating mute, another who calls out the names of bugs before eating them, and one is a daffy werewolf) either for comedy or terror.
Reportedly, there were plans to bring back Stephen Geoffreys as “Evil” Ed Thompson, but he declined to return due to a commitment in appearing in 976-EVIL, prompting his character to get rewritten as the comical vampire, Louie, played by Jon Gries. Amanda Bearse also declined to come back to her role as Amy Peterson due to seeing her role expanded on TV’s “Married…with Children”; Charley would give an explanation on why he would no longer be with Amy (something about her leaving him for an older man who resembled Jerry Dandridge), but that scene ended up getting cut out of the final release. The main baddie, Regina, was originally intended to play for comedy more so than the seductive menace that we see in the final product, playing up the character to spoof “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” to rival Peter Vincent for control of his TV show. Julie Carmen would decline the role until revisions were made to make the character less of a spoof and more of the seductive vampire that Chris Sarandon had been in the first film.
The most charitable thing that I can say about Fright Night Part 2 is that, despite a smaller budget of $8 million, it appears that it makes better use of its production money than its predecessor, especially in the design and implementation of the creature designs. The make-up work, in particular, is quite good for a smaller film, some of them effectively scary when the time comes for them to rear their (literally) ugly heads in the story.
Despite its low budget, Fright Night Part 2 would go on to be a commercial disappointment, taking in just under $3 million in its short run. While the sequel had been green-lit before the first film had even hit theaters, there was a changing of the guard at Columbia Pictures, who looked down upon horror flicks and instead wanted to concentrate on more high-brow entertainment that might give the studio prestige and a number of Oscar nominations. They ended up selling off the rights through producer Herb Jaffe to Fright Night to a small company called New Century Vista, the makers of lesser-tier efforts like Maid to Order, Russkies, The Gate, and The Wraith.
Director Wallace and co-star McDowall blamed the lack of distribution on New Century Vista’s head, Jose Menendez, for releasing the film with poor marketing and no more than 150 theaters. Even with its financial failure, there were still plans to continue on with an attempt at a third movie in the franchise, with Tom Holland possibly returning, but these plans would get nixed with the infamous murder of Menendez and his wife by his sons, Lyle and Eric, on August 20, 1989, on the evening after he had that unpleasant discussion with Wallace and McDowall. Upon hearing the news, McDowall mentioned to Wallace in a phone conversation, “Well, I didn’t do it. Did you?”
With a third movie seen as not holding much promise, the franchise would remain dormant, at least until a less-appealing remake in 2011 featuring Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell, and a straight-to-video follow-up with a different cast in 2013. Tom Holland, who had sold off the rights to his work just to get the first film made is seeking to regain ownership thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, which grants the original creators of their licensed property the chance to reacquire the rights. Holland toyed with another film but has chosen to concentrate instead on making a novel to follow up his 1985 film, with the potential to make it into a movie if it proves popular. He has also come up with a story that was pushed off into a 24-issue series of comic books called, “Fright Night: The Peter Vincent Chronicles” which follows immediately after the events of the first film.
Jerry Dandridge famously tells Vincent the vampire hunter when confronted with a crucifix, to no avail, “You have to have faith for this to work on me.” Without a studio willing to back its product, and a director who had little interest in the source material Holland drew from to make the original Fright Night so fun, there wasn’t anyone who possessed enough faith in their own film to make this one a success.
Qwipster’s rating: D
MPAA Rated: Rated R for gore, violence, sensuality, and language
Running Time: 104 min.
Cast: William Ragsdale, Roddy McDowall, Traci Lind, Julie Carmen, Jon Gries, Russell Clark, Brian Thompson, Merritt Butrick, Ernie Sabella
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Screenplay: Tim Metcalfe, Miguel Tejada-Flores, Tommy Lee Wallace