Fright Night

 The 80's was a hell of a decade for vampire movies. Lost Boys, Near Dark, The Hunger; A lot of people swear by Salem's Lot, I'll go to bat for Vamp and Lifeforce. Much as I like all of them, none of is as good as Fright Night. 

 Charlie (William Ragsdale) is kind of a dick. That's quickly established in the very first scene of the movie: Charlie alternately gets obnoxiously annoyed with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) when she won't put out during a session of heavy petting, and then, when she relents, he quickly loses interest to go spy on his new neighbours as they take a coffin into their house. Not cool, dude. On both counts.

 Amy rightly storms off, but it turns out that Charlie was right to be intrigued as he soon discovers his neighbour is a vampire. He's found out in turn, though, which sets off a really fun game of cat and mouse as the vampire (Chris Sarandon) goes out of his way to terrorize him and his friends. Their only hope? Local horror host and b-movie star Peter Vincent, vampire killer (Roddy McDowall).

 Charlie is not a very fun protagonist. He's the typical horror movie teenager who gets laughed at when he tries to get help for a very real threat, and a lot of the movie is... well, just that. At least he passes as a teenager, kinda, despite Ragsdale being twenty-something at the time (poor Bearse was closer to her thirties, and she very much doesn't; not even if you squint).
 But while Charlie gets all the tedious running around trying to convince others that vampires are real, the vampire himself and his familiar Billy (Jonathan Stark) run rings around him, taunting him right in front of the people he's trying to convince. It's delightful.
 And when Peter Vincent, vampire killer enters the picture, first in a sort of intervention to convince Charlie vampires aren't real - well, the movie is complete. Vincent is a genius creation, a slightly selfish, completely normal person who discovers that there might be a calling for his on-screen persona in the real world after all, and is understandably terrified by it. There are so many great character moments in this movie - expertly played - that it can afford to play the horror stuff fairly straight and still be hilarious.

 And it's an excellent genre movie even without the comedy. I'm not going to even pretend it's scary, but aside from a couple hiccups it's put together very tightly, with events flowing cleanly and escalating to a very eventful, effects-filled finale that fully utilizes everything Richard Edlund's effects team had learnt doing Ghostbusters the previous year.

 Writer/Director Tom Holland had already secured himself a place in cult royalty by writing Class of 1984 and Psycho 2 (and Cloak & Dagger, another movie I loved as a kid). He'd go on from this to write Child's play and then disappear a little, resurfacing in the '90's with a couple of middling Stephen King adaptations. His direction here is superb and the movie is full of indelible images.

 Vampires, like any monster that successfully incorporates himself into culture at large, are a sort of swiss army knife of anxieties and dark impulses - fear of powerful, privileged twats, the allure of sex, etc. Here Sarandon fully embodies the fear that a more intelligent, handsome, and successful man will take your woman away. He's ridiculously attractive and charismatic, of course, and plays his vampire with an impish sense of fun - even looking at the camera at one point. Between him and Peter Vincent (such a great name, even if it's just a compound reference) they eat the movie whole, fully compensating for the slightly boring lead character and leaving very little for anything else in memory other than a bunch of very cool special effects. It's an extremely fun movie.