Movie Nation

Can a 3D horror movie be a thing of beauty? In the case of the remake of “Fright Night,” the answer is “Yes!”

This violent and violently funny vampire tale covers no new ground, sporting the same jokey tone as the original. But there’s a quirky sensibility that we might attribute to director Craig Gillespie, who gave us the gently twisted “Lars and the Real Girl.” “Fright Night” can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

But hiring Javier Aguirresarobe, who shot “Goya’s Ghosts,” “New Moon” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” was also a coup. His 3D camera sweeps into smoky, shadowy rooms, lit only by candles or a flickering TV screen, through the empty streets of a Vegas suburb and into the garish neon of Las Vegas itself. Yeah, the screen hurls blood, guts, shattered glass, arrows and crucifixes right in our face. It is a 3D HORROR movie after all.  But the look here is as striking as any film to use 3D.

The story? Kids and adults are disappearing. But the economy’s bad and foreclosed houses are everywhere. And besides, as Charlie (Anton Yelchin) says, “Nobody lives in Vegas, they just pass through.”

That makes this the perfect spot for a vampire killing spree. Charlie pays no attention to the warnings of his nerdy friend, Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). The kid reads “too much ‘Twilight,’” just one of the reasons Charlie abandoned him as a pal. He can’t impress the stunning Amy (Imogen Poots) if his geek past is right there in front of her.

But Charlie soon has reason to become just as suspicious of their new neighbor as Ed. Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a hunk who seems to do a lot of home repairs on his tract house — at night. Charlie can’t tell the cops or tell his mom (Toni Collette) or even Amy. Who would believe him, even as the truancy list at his high school grows by the day?

The bulk of the movie is Charlie trying to outrun and outsmart a very clever, ruthless vampire, a blood-sucker who deals with the suspicious the same way he deals with everybody else — with a bite.

We know all the “rules” for fighting vampires, thanks to pop culture. “Fright Night” adds smart phones to the vampire hunter’s tool kit, right next to stakes of holly, holy water and crucifixes.

Former Doctor Who David Tennant does a Russell Brand turn as the drunken, over-sexed Peter Vincent, star of a Vegas stage show about fighting and killing vampires, a show called “Fright Night.”  Roddy McDowell played this campy role in the original film — a fraud who passes himself off as an expert, but is given a put-up-or-shut-up choice when the kid comes to him for help fighting real vampires.

The vamp-transformation effects are quite good, the gimmicky uses of 3D lots of fun. But perhaps the most special effect of all is Farrell. Pardon the pun, but he chews this movie up.

As we’ve seen in films from “Captain America” to “The Help,” spending the money on landing a very good, very menacing actor to be your villain makes the difference, especially in a movie that otherwise is a entirely too familiar to keep us awake all the way through one long night of fright.

MPAA Rating: R, for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references.

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

Credits: Directed by Craig Gillespie, written by Marti Noxon, based on “Fright Night,” written and directed by Tom Holland, produced by Michael DeLuca, Michael J. Gaeta and Alison R. Rosenzweig. A DreamWorks release.

Running time: 1:45.

Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is a thriller that makes you wish you knew how to scream “O.M.G.” in Korean.

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There’s a melancholy verse from W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues that carries everything you need to know about age and regret in a single line.

“I hate to see that evening sun go down, ’cause it makes me think I’m on my last go ’round.”

Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) doesn’t sing, doesn’t quote the verse. But at 80, he knows it in his bones. He’s determined to not let that evening sun go down on him in a Tennessee old folks home. That’s why he busts out.

That Evening Sun is an indie film based on a William Gay short story and was made by Georgia native Scott Teems. It’s a classic slice of Southern Gothic, the sort of movie that gets the South in that William Faulkner way. It’s about class and poverty, blood and land.

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In “Seven Days in Utopia,” a mild-mannered young golfer has a mild meltdown in the middle of a tournament. That’s  followed by seven days of perspective-patching among mild-mannered God-fearing folk in rural Texas. Faith and “fore” walk hand in hand — sort of — in this soft-centered faith-based drama starring Lucas Black of “Friday Night Lights,” “Get Low” and “Jarhead.”

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Julian Schnabel tries and fails to boil down fifty years of Middle Eastern history as seen and experienced by a handful of inter-related Palestinians in “Miral,” an ambitious but seriously muddled melodrama.The Oscar-nominated director of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” struggles to make sense of his journalist-girlfriend’s semi-autobiographical novel, which skips back and forth between characters, back and forth from 1947 and the impending creation of Israel, to the 1967 Six Day War, to 1973, 1987 and the Intifada — the Palestinian uprising — of the early 90s.

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When was the last time a zombie movie touched you, made an emotional connection? It’s been a while, right? Maybe a moment or a character in “28 Days Later.” But before that? And after it?

That’s what jumps at you in “Rammbock” (“Siege of the Dead”), a lean little German zombie thriller opening in select cities for a limited run on May 4.

A peripheral character in this film, a husband, has run out of tranquilizers for his infected wife. She snarls and snaps at him and the two heroes of the film who have come to his apartment for help. The husband holds out his arms for his beloved, she leaps for him and he embraces her and takes her right out the window with him, an expression of love so eternal that I can’t recall it ever happening in a zombie movie before.

But there are a few moments with this sort of pathos in this generally light, brisk (just over an hour) German film from writer Benjamin Hessler and director Marvin Kren. That makes “Rammbock” stand out from the ever-growing  zombie movie pack.

Michael or “Michi” (Michael Fuith) has come to Berlin to confront Gabi, the longtime girlfriend who abruptly dumped him, by phone. He opens the door to her apartment, calls her and nobody’s home. A maintenance comes in to do some work, and suddenly goes berserk and is dispatched in a geyser of blood.

The disease, “like rabies or something” hits and become “Germany’s 9/11.” Zombies are staggering through the streets and into the courtyard of a small apartment block. The residents there are terrified, behind locked doors, able to communicate through their windows as they look down on the menace below.

Michi finds himself penned up with handyman Harper (Theo Thebs),  a guy who is a bit quicker to recognize what’s going on as an apocalypse of sorts. Michi is frantically calling Gabi’s cell phone and stupidly protecting her property, her silverware, from Harper’s efforts to protect them as the world is ending just outside their door.

“Rammbock” follows them through a harrowing couple of days, penned in.  There are craven moments, as some neighbors cower and insist that “somebody” lock the gate so the zombies can’t get back into the courtyard — nobody wants to take that risk. And there are comic and even heroic ones as these survivors improvise a way of getting from apartment to apartment without opening the front door.

And through it all, Michi’s love is strong. He is still determined to find Gabi and rescue her. If she’ll still have him. Fuith is a wonderful blend of comically hapless and heartsick in the part.

It’s not as scary as “28 Days Later,” not as funny as “Zombieland” or “Shaun of the Dead” (which has a similar save-the-girlfriend story). But “Rammbock” is scores with its pathos and its DIY ethos. With every film student on the planet plotting his or her chance to slap ragged clothes and makeup on actors good at lurching, “Rammbock” may turn out to be the most valuable and instructive zombie movie of them all. Laughs and exploding heads? Seen it, done it. But a zombie movie with heart? That’s novel.

MPAA rating: R for some horror violence.

Cast: Michael Fuith, Theo Thebs, Anna Graczyk

Credits: Directed by Marvin Kren, written by Benjamin Hessler and produced by Sigrid Hoerner.  A Bloody Disgusting Selects release. Running time: 1:04.