Twixt (2011)

A long long time ago, there existed a filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola. He made a string of genre-defining films that were critically appraised worldwide – the first two Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation – and he was regularly and rightfully renowned in film fanatic circles as one of the medium's best artists.

That was in the 70s, though. Now he makes movies like Twixt.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Val Kilmer, Elle Fanning, Bruce Dern

IMDb

Co-written with The Observer and Michelle.

Apparently the idea for this movie came to Coppola in a dream, which makes sense, as I also try to turn all of my dreams into movies. The only problem is, I can't get a studio to green-light a movie about conquering the king of the mole people who lives in the lost kingdom Atlantis with a sword made entirely out of cheese wedges as a metaphor for my own coming of age.

So to get out my frustration, I'm just going to talk about Twixt. Take a deep breath, guys; it's gonna be a weird-ass trip.

We start this off with a narration that I'm sure lead actor Val Kilmer recorded when he was working off a bad hangover from the previous night. He narrates about how there's this town with a clocktower with seven clockheads, none of which tell the right time – which really makes sense, when you don't try to think about it at all and instead move onto something else entirely.

He also says it was “a town of people who wanted to be left alone,” which might sound like a cool premise to set up a story, but really it's never elaborated on – so it mostly just comes off as kinda douchey on the part of the collective townfolk. As far as PR for this town goes, Kilmer isn't doing a good job. He just makes it sound like some shithole with nothing to do, so, I guess give him props for truth in advertising.

Then again, as we'll find out later, the town is also somewhat famous for having vampires hanging out there, which I guess would bring a higher concentration of Hot Topic shoppers there or something, so at least they'd have that.

The commercial for Hot Topic's new clothing line isn't looking too good...I recommend a re-shoot, preferably with a hot chick in that same position.

As for the vampires themselves, well, they're really more of an afterthought; never given real characters or even any purpose in the story. It's really quite astounding that Coppola managed to shoehorn in fucking vampires into this and made them the most forgettable thing in the movie. Oh, except that the lead vampire's name is Flamingo, and that they just kinda hang out on the other side of this lake in town. But I think the fact that his name is Flamingo is the more important part there.

I guess we're supposed to believe Kilmer's character, Hall Baltimore, is a pulp horror fiction writer who is going to this town to sell books. However, when he asks where the bookstore is, he's told there isn't one at all, and so he ends up selling books out of this random hardware store instead. So why did he come to this town again? Did he just pack his shit into his car and go 'alright, time to go drive in a random direction until I find a town shitty enough to just let me set up camp without warning'? I mean, either that or his agent massively fucked up somewhere along the line.

A vision into Val Kilmer's future.

His only real guest is Sheriff Bobby Lagrange, played by Bruce Dern, later of the much better movie Nebraska. I love one of Lagrange's first lines: “How does it feel to be a bargain basement Stephen King?” Well, I'd imagine not very good. Lagrange then proceeds to just sort of take one of Hall's books without paying and have him sign it, saying he's one of his biggest fans – gee, with fans who insult you and take your books without paying, who needs enemies?

"Also, your penmanship sucks."

Then, I guess, Lagrange wants to show Hall this dead body in the morgue as an inspiration for a new book, which Lagrange wants to help write, or something. The body for some reason is just held in the sheriff's office, and still has the stake that was used to murder her sticking out of the top of the body, because why remove that, anyway? Just leave it there as a warning to everyone else. A warning to what, you may ask? Uh...to not play with large wooden stakes, I guess...

"So why did you leave that stake in the body? Why not take it out?"
"Don't you bring your big-city smart guy bullshiiiiiit in here! We do things old school in this town! To make sure our dead bodies don't turn into vampires, we leave the stakes in for 30 days after!"
"I've never heard that about---"
"SILENCE!"

Hall goes out and finds this old hotel where apparently Edgar Allen Poe once stayed – pfft, yeah right, but whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night! He then partakes in one of the movie's favorite pastimes – getting into a Skype argument with his wife over money.

Skype chats are instant drama!

You know, I guess these scenes could be way worse, but they're pretty fuckin' bad coming from the guy who once gave us the masterfully crafted destruction of Michael Corleone's familial relationships, is Val Kilmer whining to his wife over Skype really the best we could expect? Here's one of the lines he delivers, so make up your own minds: “People ask why I'm so good at writing about witches, and I tell them it's because I married one!”

Riveting. Just...riveting.

Then he goes for a walk in the woods and the movie loses its mind! Apparently, while walking in the woods, he runs into this young girl played by Elle Fanning, who was in the much better Super 8 the same year as this came out. The girl has a conversation with Hall about, I don't know, her braces or something.

"I think my braces make me look ugly."
"No, the Anne Rice-wannabe makeup is what does that!"

Then she says she really enjoys Hall's books, so I guess it's good that he managed to find a thirteen-year-old girl who enjoyed his work! I wonder what pops up on Amazon's “also recommended” feature when you buy his shit?

Yeah, sounds about right. She also says she couldn't make it to Hall's book signing because she didn't know what time it was, on account of the seven clock faces all telling different times in the town. Which, again, isn't a ridiculous idea at all for a town to adopt that! Pfft, I mean, telling time is for losers.

Anyway, he then loses track of her and finds this mysterious house in the woods where some weird stuff is going on with a creepy priest guy hoarding 10 or so children into the basement, or some shit like that. Apparently the Elle Fanning girl is there too. I don't know – it's a very dreamlike, weird sequence and doesn't really have much context right now. The girl gets into an argument with the priest-looking dude, saying she “knows what he did,” but they separate and nothing comes of it yet.

Oh, and sometime during this weird sequence, he also runs into Edgar Allen Poe, because why not?

Well, never seen Edgar Allen Poe erotica before, so there is that novelty...

If none of this makes any sense to you, well, it's because most of that sequence was in the past, and Hall can now visit the past, or dream world, or whatever it is, when he falls asleep. This isn't really established very well at all, and the story as a whole is very muddled and hard to follow overall.

Hall investigates a bit, and even goes to a library – which I'm just now realizing would have been a much better place to hold that fucking book signing than a goddamned hardware store. That's a minor detail, but what else am I supposed to focus on? I get that Hall is reading up on the town history of some murders or something, but I'm not really convinced Val Kilmer can read – he did say yes to this script, after all.

There's another sequence where Hall goes to see the police chief and has to call the operator to get the phone number so he can call inside and get them to let him in. Then he knocks on the door and the deputy guy is in there anyway – so the entire thing was pointless. Amazing. The deputy goes on this whole spiel about it being Sunday so the sheriff's office is closed – then why he is there? The movie has no idea either.

"This town is so shitty, we just converted my house into a sheriff's office! MY LIFE IS ENDLESS MISERY!"

For that matter, the sheriff's office is just closed on Sunday in this town? I get that it's a small town, but come on, does crime take a break on Sundays? Are you just operating on good faith?

I guess Hall gets the idea to write a story about the town because of his dream sequence, which he gets the title “The Vampire Executions” from LaGrange. Speaking of that crazy old coot, LaGrange is apparently so into this vampire crap that he made a little wooden model of the execution chair, complete with a little girl doll in it getting murdered - with painted blood on it, mind you - when he presses a switch.

That's it, game over man!

I just...really have no fucking idea what mushrooms Coppola ate when he was making this, but I have a feeling they're the same ones needed to actually understand what the hell this movie was going for.

There's also a billion more scenes with the split-screen thing going on for Skype calls. He tells his wife about the book idea, and then he talks to this old coot from his publishing company, who is very insistent that he not use the “fog on the lake” line in his opening scene, as well as just kinda pushy in general. He really just seems way too eager and energetic. It's like, c'mon buddy, you're in Twixt, you can just relax now.

Then the very next scene, we get Hall sitting in front of a computer screen like a goddamn web-blogger trying to write the opening of the novel. Because this movie is a horrible abomination against good taste, he apparently can't think of anything that ISN'T the “fog on the lake” line to open the story – I guess he's a shitty writer; whodathunkit.

Boy, Dean Koontz's later work under a pseudonym really isn't that good, huh?

After a way-too-long scene of him trying to write, the movie just gives up and he starts rambling about gay basketball players from the 60s and all sorts of other completely random nonsense that sounds like I'm making it up – but no, rest assured, it's really in the movie. Why? I have no idea. And frankly, I don't really want to know. Coppola...I think your movie is broken beyond repair. This whole thing is the cinematic equivalent to a Blue Screen of Death – it's just done.

This about sums up the entire movie.

Or, wait, I got a better one – do you guys remember that Homestar Runner cartoon about the virus on Strong Bad's computer? That's what this movie is. Just complete random bullshit, getting more and more insane and incomprehensible with each scene and eventually kind of imploding on itself.

Then we get a scene where Hall breaks into the sheriff's office in the middle of the night to examine that body with the stake in it. I'm just fucking astounded that the sheriff's office is locked on a Sunday morning but then at night it's apparently wide open for anyone to break in. But hey, why make sense now?

"Why couldn't I have just come in the next day and asked about this in public, seeing as they're obviously cooperative with me so far? Because...well, I'm just a fucking idiot."

Because the movie isn't done ritualistically murdering our brain cells, we get a scene where Hall and the sheriff's guys actually use a Ouija board to try and contact the dead girl to see if they can figure out who killed her. Why bother with actual investigations? It's not like you're police officers or something! Just use a Ouija board; it's how all the best detectives do it. I mean I still haven't seen True Detective, but I'm pretty sure they do this kind of shit all the time on that show.

When your detective team is so sad you have to invite a random little kid who gets zero lines in the film into your group. Yes, really - that kid is never introduced as a real character and has no lines. But that doesn't surprise me at this point.

If these scenes I'm describing sound splattershot-random to you, it's because they pretty much are. None of these scenes really have any point to them and most of them end quite abruptly without accomplishing much in terms of the story. While I can see what Coppola was going for with the story, the way it's told really is pretty slipshod-poor. There's just no coherence to any of this and it's making it even kind of hard to write this review. They've finally done it! They've created the Anti-Cinema Freaks movie! A movie so incomprehensible I can't even describe it right!

What else is there to talk about? The scene where he confronts those vampires across the lake and nothing comes of it?

When the kid with lipstick, mascara and a black cape seems like the more sensible one in your movie.

Nah.

Maybe the scene where it's finally revealed, after a lengthy shouting match in Hall's hotel room, that Sheriff Bobby LaGrange was the "wooden stake" killer all along, because why wouldn't he be? There were so many clues, if you skipped to the end of the movie and watched the ending first. I mean otherwise it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever as there were zero clues. But whatever!

We then get another acid trip flashback where we see that  the creepy minister guy from the past killed all of the kids in his care because he was afraid of them getting turned into vampires. That is just...so logical, and makes so much sense, that I can't even come up with words to describe it. It's just the zenith of filmmaking and storytelling.

Then we see the Elle Fanning girl from before, who apparently tried to run away, and so he did the logical thing and kidnapped her, chaining her to the wall in a creepy out of the way building and torturing her.

I guess she got turned into a vampire somehow, but even that's not very clear.

So what was this guy's plan again? Vampires exist, so kill every human being you can rather than let the vampires get them? Well when you put it like THAT it sounds...completely batshit. Thanks for more murdered brain cells, movie!

Whatever – just get to the scene where Hall looks longingly over the random cliff we haven't seen before and sees his dead daughter's face reflected in the water for no reason:

Apparently Elle Fanning was Edgar Allen Poe's lost Lenore, or some shit like that. And yes, he is rolling in his grave right now!

Oh yeah, I did forget to mention that subplot? About the dead daughter? I'm just heartbroken over this now. How can I be trusted to review things in a professional manner at all? Eh, on second thought, it doesn't really matter.

Then Hall goes back to the sheriff's office where he finds the vampire-ghost of Elle Fanning waiting under the sheet to kill him, in a very bloody and violent manner...

...only for him to then wake up in a chair in a nice office, handing the book he just wrote to the publisher. Yes, I'm dead serious. This whole thing was basically just an allegory for a hack writer stealing someone else's ideas and using them as his own to make money. Truly worth all the fever-dream sequences and non-sequitur dialogue, right?

Even better is the ending text scroll we're left with:

Yes, the fact that Hall's new book did “pretty good business” really did deserve priority over the next bullet under it, which says that LaGrange was a murderer. Book sales always trump the lives of dead people. Great list there, movie!

Okay, I'm about ready to check into the psychiatric ward after this movie. I seriously just don't even know, man. I mean, it's awful, it really is – the acting's either wooden or extremely overdramatic, the story is a hackneyed mess which the numerous over-long dream sequences don't help, most scenes go nowhere, and the twist at the end is so random that I feel like it was just made up on the spot when Coppola wrote that scene.

But strangely, it isn't the worst thing I've ever seen – I mean, it does have a certain personal feel to it that likely comes from the fact that Coppola wrote, directed and produced the thing. And to be fair, despite the film's complete insanity, there really is nothing else like it out there – it is one of a kind, for better or for worse.

Plus, it's really funny to watch and riff on with friends. Never underestimate the power of that virtue.

My only lingering question about all this is, since Val Kilmer was once Batman, and one actor who used to be Batman got a super-cool meta-comedy film about his career, when do we get Kilmer's version of the same? My guess after seeing this movie is, not any time soon.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Fright Night (1985)

These days, movies like The Wicker Man (remake) come out where they get famous based solely on a few minutes of schlocky fun, when really the rest of the movie isn't like that and is, for the most part, a sizable step down in quality from said schlocky fun. But the film gets “so bad it's good” praise from people anyway despite the fact that they're really just praising that short few minutes of schlocky fun.

Well...everything has to start somewhere!

Director: Tom Holland

Starring: William Ragsdale, Chris Sarandon

IMDb

Fright Night is a 1985 horror comedy that got a lot of lip service back in the day, which I'm pretty sure was for the bangin' 80s music and visuals. Yeah! Shake those hips.

The 80s was the only time you could get your party on and get a relaxing back massage at the same place.

But the movie doesn't start off with such extravagant extremes, no; instead we get a much humbler opening of main character Charley Brewster almost having sex with his girlfriend Amy, but she pulls back at the last second, feeling nervous I guess. Then she changes her mind again and wants to do it, but by that time, Charley's goldfish-sized attention span has gone to the next logical place – the weird stuff happening across the street, like new neighbors moving in.

You know, the common hierarchy: New neighbors are more important than sex. Just how it goes, guys.

"Honey, your total willingness to have sex with me is less important than two guys carrying a box around outside. We have a good relationship!"

Downstairs, they get into a fight because he didn't want to have sex when she was ready. Uh excuse ME young lady, but weren't YOU the one refusing HIM sex like five minutes ago? You guys have as much synchonicity as two parallel lines running for miles without intersecting. People on other sides of the planet have better chemistry. A blind guy and a deaf girl could connect better.

The mother, even despite hearing this conversation, continues planning her son's marriage to this girl. Are you just really desperate? I guess the fact that Charley, given the rest of the movie, was able to land a girlfriend at all was so mind-fuckingly, rainbow-burstingly amazing to her that she now insists he marry the chick before he screws it all up as she knows he will.

But it's okay – there's a vampire moved in across the street! Charley knows this because he's apparently related to that jackass from From Dusk Til Dawn 2 – think about it; the same vacant stares, the same lack of any likability AND the same paranoid delusions about vampires validated in implausible ways! Plus they both get distracted from sex by what's on TV. Long lost brothers, you have finally found each other.

You can tell by the identical vacant, wide-eyed stares of dumbfounded idiocy on their faces.

Although overall, Fright Night is the better movie. Why? Because the main character in From Dusk Til Dawn 2 never got the hamburger in the face he deserved:

*slow clap*

So apparently the story here is that Charley saw some really hot prostitute going over to the house next door and then saw her later get killed by the guy next door, who is a vampire. He knows he's a vampire because he was spying on the hot naked chick and then saw...well, vampire shenanigans, I guess is the best way to put it!

"I could have had actual sex with a willing girlfriend if I hadn't been such a dick-cheese and spent more time looking out the window! BUT BOOBS! OOOOHHH!"

That's another thing - a big plot point throughout the first act is Jerry the vampire mad at Charley for exposing him. But Jerry has no fucking problem leaving a window open while he's showing off his vamp powers? C'mon, man - get with the program.

The next day he sees a news report that says a “known prostitute” was killed last night – i.e. the same chick Charley saw in the window. But, uh, how does one become a known prostitute to the level of being mentioned as such on the news? How did she get such a reputation? Maybe she has a Facebook page. Yes, I know it's 1985. Shut up.

Charley calls the only black guy in this movie's world, a cop who comes over and investigates with the panache and professionalism I expect from dumb 80s horror movies – he basically acts like a debate moderator. He lets Charley hurl wild accusations and then turns to the guy at the house and goes, “Well, what do you have to say about that?” Dude, nobody's getting points for the strengths of their argument here. Fucking do your job, or go home.

He's my third favorite movie cop. Right behind the guy from Dead Silence and Danny Glover in Predator 2.

After the vampire dude's helper convinces the detective nothing's going on, Charley storms out after the detective screaming like an insane person that VAMPIRES EXIST! Because that's sure to win him over, ya know, like it does most good cops. I love the way the detective screams at him before he gets in the car – he says if Charley bothers him again, he'll lock him up FOREVER!

"I regularly kidnap law abiding citizens who annoy me and lock them up in grimy dungeons with no hope of escape! SO DON'T CROSS ME, BOY!"

Well, I do agree Charley needs to be locked up. But I don't know if you have enough evidence yet. Give me a call sometime, man; I'll help you plant drugs in his room so you have probable cause.

Then Charley goes to find his TV hero, Peter Vincent, who makes a living as a character even less credible than the Crypt Keeper. But for some reason, Charley seems to think this guy is the answer – a fucking TV actor is apparently the most credible expert in this world.

The common expression anyone who interacts with Charley gets within thirty seconds of speaking to him.

Are you going to call Christopher Lloyd next time you need help on your science project that involves traveling back in time? Maybe call Bill Murray next time you need help fighting a ghost?

I guess it's a funny enough scenario for a comedy, but I just have to wonder about Charley's sanity at this point. Maybe the kid who starts believing in vampires in the span of two seconds looking out his window, to the point where he decorates his room with some rather questionable feng shui:

He's a born again idiot.

...maybe it's time to start asking around about which mental hospital has the best security, hmm?

Either way, we can all agree on one thing – the kid playing Evil Ed was clearly directed to act like he was on a manic drug trip with no clear stopping point.

"I'M GONNA NEED DENTAL WORK AFTER ALL THIS TEETH-GRINDING!"

I just don't know what to say about this except that I really want to go back in time myself now and see what exactly director Tom Holland was telling this guy: “Okay, act like you're strung out on heroin, haven't slept in four days and just took a triple shot of Espresso to compensate! And like you were also raised in a den of insane clowns in a traveling circus. Yeah! Now we got this horror movie performance down.” Oh 1985 – never go away.

Also, what's up with Amy's clothing choices? Is she just wearing the entire GoodWill catalog's fall edition? I mean fuck, it's not that cold, woman – you can take off a sweater or two!

But this is all just window dressing for the main plot of Charley, Ed and Amy getting Vincent to come with them and prove the neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (you know, a name I would expect any fearsome vampire to have) is a vampire. They do this by making him drink some fake holy water. When Charley tries to point a cross at Dandridge, which actually makes him flinch and recoil, the rest of the gang tells him don't be silly, etc.

"My, what big fangs you have."

You idiots, all he has to have now is a fucking neon flashing sign saying I'M A VAMPIRE to be any more obvious! How do you not see it?!?

But I'm not one to just bash ONE side of stupidity – I also think it's pretty lame how douchey Charley acts when they're all walking home later, just screaming hysterically about vampires and insulting his supposed “friend” Ed. As much as I think the Ed character was probably a product of drug-induced insanity, at least he's funny. Charley right now is about as likable as pond scum. Yeah man - you insult your friends and sulk like a big crybaby. You won this argument.

So after a dumb joke where Ed pretends to be attacked, screams and worries his two friends, they part ways and then hear him scream again. Even though it's been several minutes and he has no reason to do another joke exactly like the one from before – it's a horror movie convention that they do the whole “boy cries wolf” routine and ignore him. Even though THIS time he really is in trouble!

"It is I, Fabio's obscure vampire cousin, here to put you out of your misery!"

Yes, now he's a vampire. And also the thing everyone remembers about this movie – nobody really cares about the rest of it; just Evil Ed the vampire. He pretty much acts the same as he did before this, which is to say he acts like a man in the throes of a psychotic breakdown. But now he has a voice that sounds like your grandmother after someone dropped a piano on her pinky toe. So there is that...

He just wants a hug. Though I understand if his scenery-chewing abilities frighten you. He could devour you whole, and not just because he's a vampire.

In addition to that wonderful addition to cinema canon, we get a scene where he has a cross burned into his head. I'm sure he'll have fun attending Westboro Baptist Church meetings from now on.

Meanwhile, at a dance club, Jerry Dandridge (they really couldn't give him a cooler name? Even something generic like Lord Darkness or something?) seduces Amy and takes her away – because I guess 1980s glitter and neon lights just make anyone look more appealing. He takes her back to his house and plays Dress Up like a Toga Frat Party:

Only I'm not sure those parties usually had biting involved. Eh, maybe they did.

So I guess Charley and Vincent team up to go to the house and fight Dandridge. Dandridge's henchman shows up and Vincent ends up shooting him in the face – it would have been funny if that was just the end of it, but alas, he's been turned into a vampire now. So like most of the time when you kill a vampire, he melts into Nickelodeon slime. 

Iiiiiiiiiit's slime time!

We get some more really drawn out scenes, with one really memorable one in the mix somewhere – it's when Peter Vincent goes over to Charley's house and finds Evil Ed under the covers of Charley's mom's bed. After some truly silly and hammy lines where he somehow makes the simple explanation of Charley's mom leaving dinner in the oven for him sound like a goddamn theatrical production. Gee. Really reaching for the bottom of the barrel there, huh? Really no better jokes you could have used than “Dinner's in the oven”?



Then Ed turns into a wolfman and fights Vincent that way. Unfortunately, every hammy over the top 80s performance must come to an end.

"Dammit, another incident where I end up alone in a stranger's house with a naked teenage boy."

Good thing, too; if he had kept going, he probably could have created a black hole and sucked up reality into an alternate dimension where this kind of acting is considered Shakespearean. And that world, my friends, is one I tremble to imagine.

When Vincent gets back over to the other house, they have an extremely long fight scene during which time I'm positive the casting crew, makeup artists and others had time to do their nails, read the rest of Moby Dick, work out real estate deals for new houses, write shitty scripts for unmade Fright Night sequels and work on their memoirs for appearing in a film that somehow drags out this story to two hours.

"I will not be killed by Ray Harryhausen scraps!"

I'm sorry, I was dozing off a bit there.

Anyway, they kill him by punching holes in the wall until he explodes and then driving a stake through his heart, which somehow makes him stand up as if he were a yard rake and you stepped on its teeth.

And he also makes squeaky noises if you punch him in the face.

Either way he's dead and the whole thing is finally over. Amy even turns back into a human, which I didn't know could happen – but hey, vampires. They're wacky! I think mostly they just wanted to spare the world more of this "vagina face" style makeup job:

Eugh. Did somebody just fall asleep when they were doing her face?

So then the movie ends with Charley and Amy back in his room having sex again. Because she's such a good catch, he of course gets distracted by the TV again, proving that he has learned nothing and that they are truly made for each other.

Oh ho ho. In their future I see plenty of nights where the deep hatred stewing between them reaches a near-boiling point as she tries to give him a handjob after making dinner and cleaning the house and he shrugs her off without looking at her because hey, Sons of Anarchy is on and he wants to see what happens next. After months of turgid arguments where she cries how he just doesn't understand her and he says what do you want from me, and she says I just want you to listen to me for once, and then he just shrugs her off and goes down to the bar for a drink and to watch the game in the peace of all the other tired, frustrated old men, and he comes back to find that she's trashed the place in a rage, spray painted FUCK YOU on the walls in bright purple, and gone to live at a lesbian nudist retreat for the rest of her life.

At least I think that's how it goes. You can change up a few details if you want. Never let it be said I don't make this blog interactive – you can give 'em a happy ending if you like.

This movie is just silly. It's got a funny premise and the story moves along okay for the most part, but it's too long and the main character is just a douchebag through and through, with no redeeming qualities as a character. I mean, he's just so lame. I really thought this movie could have been way better if it focused on another character entirely - maybe the story from Ed's point of view would have been good, as he's actually a likable character and elicits a little bit of sympathy. Or from Peter Vincent's point of view, as he seems like he has more invested in all of this.

Charley is just a boring, awful little douche, and really just shows the limitations of so many of these kinds of films - focusing on the most boring cardboard cutout of a suburban white kid just to make it "relatable." We could have had a potentially interesting, funny flick, but what do we get?

Eugh. I get it, the point of the story is a kid who thinks his new neighbor is a vampire. Keep him in the story, sure; but at least do us the courtesy of having a better character be the main focus!

The Evil Ed stuff is funny, and there are some other clever bits, but it really does start to drag as it goes on and it should have been trimmed by at least twenty minutes if not more. It's obviously better than The Wicker Man remake which I mentioned earlier, but I really do think most of the fame tends to stem from the Evil Ed performance - it was the most memorable part of the movie. It's a fairly well made film though and I can see how it was popular back in the day. But I'll stick to Re-Animator for my gory laughs.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.