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Dom Robinson reviews
it’ll be the night of your life.
Columbia TriStar
- Cert:
- Cat.no: CDR 10754
- Running time: 102 minutes
- Year: 1985
- Pressing: 2000
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 28 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: 6 languages
- Subtitles: 21 languages available
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 5
- Price: £19.99
- Extras: Trailer, Filmographies
Director:
- Tom Holland
(Child’s Play, Fatal Beauty, Fright Night, The Temp, Thinner)
Producer:
- Herb Jaffe
Screenplay:
- Tom Holland
Music:
- Brad Fiedel
Cast:
- Jerry Dandrige: Chris Sarandon
Charley Brewster: William Ragsdale
Amy Peterson: Amanda Bearse
Peter Vincent: Roddy McDowall
Evil Ed Thompson: Stephen Geoffreys
Billy Cole: Jonathan Stark
Detective Lennox: Art Evans
Fright Night is the name of the TV show hosted by tired old schlock-horror film star Peter Vincent (the late Roddy McDowall). In the true tradition of those who follow their heroes, some people are dumb enough to believe their real and when teenager Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) finds a vampire, Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon, looking rather Tom Berenger-ish), has moved in next door who’s he gonna call? Not Ghostbusters, but the aforementioned media man.
Vincent takes a fair bit of convincing before he’ll accept the challenge to kill Charley’s new neighbour, especially since he’s no more a murderer than the next innocent man, but the $500 he’s been bribed with from Charley’s girlfriend Amy Peterson (a pre-“Marcie from Married With Children” Amanda Bearse) will go some way to help.
The picture is surprisingly good for a fifteen-year-old film without much in the way of artifacts or dropouts and is presented in the original 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio. The average bitrate is 5.41Mb/s, occasionally peaking above 8Mb/s.
The sound has been remixed into Dolby Digital 5.1 for English only, but doesn’t shout out a great deal until later on in the film and then is used in a fairly predictable fashion.
Extras :
Not much here. A 90-second theatrical Trailer and filmographies for the director, plus McDowall and Sarandon.
A Columbia DVD so we have the usual 28 chapters and subtitles in a massive 21 languages : English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Hindi, Turkish, Danish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish and Italian.
The main menu is static, with a look to it akin to the front cover.
The film itself isn’t quite as good as I remember from when I first saw it in the 80s, not because of the special effects which are still fairly entertaining, particularly when the ghoulies die, including Charley’s unlucky best friend Evil Ed Thompson (Stephen Geoffreys), but because the build-up is so slow.
Like the genre it attempts to satirise, the cast is also stuck firmly in B-movie territory. None of the cast, apart from McDowall, have made the break into big-name movies and it’s not hard to see why although Sarandon cuts it well as a bad guy.
The disc itself is another example why Columbia should have a budget price range since it’s an old film with next-to-nothing in the way of supplemental material.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.