Yes, there is another vampire franchise. Adapted from the popular young adult novels by Darren Shan, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is another in a seemingly endless row of iterations of blood-sucking fiction. Starring the electrically coiffed John C. Reilly as a caricature of the classic Gothic vampire-turned showman, Shan's (and director Paul Weitz's) fantastical world is much more comedic and tongue-n-cheek than certain tween screamfests from the Pacific Northwest.
The story is a compilation of familiar tropes. The good kid with the naughty best friend. A dark and magical world beneath the surface of society. The menacing threat of world domination from nefarious bad guys and their henchman.
Darren (yes, the author named the character after himself) is a kind 16-year old, who exists in a Truman Show small town, where the upstanding automatons wear heavy-handed symbolic pastels and khakis to signify their iniquities and otherness from the freaks. The freaks, in this case, are quite literally a traveling freakshow, complete with bearded ladies, wolf men, and a stupefyingly-still-alive Patrick Fugit as a guitar playing lizard-teen.
Darren (Chris Massoglia) and his best friend, Steve (Josh Hutcherson) unwittingly stumble into a traveling freakshow, where a Vampire, Larten Crespley (Reilly) is the star attraction. Through plot devices better suited for a WB drama, Darren and Steve are pulled into a war between Vampire and their murderous counterparts, the horribly awkward to say, Vampaneze.
It's in this lack of indie-band seriousness - although there
is an excellent grave-digging scene overdubbed with a Nick Cave tune - where Assistant finds its niche and possibly it's identity. For those of us completely burnt
out by the inundation of vampire's in our pop-culture psyches, this movie
offers a reprieve, and a possible outlet for embattled parents sick of watching
their 12-year-olds devolve into randy Team Edward members because The Disney
Channel and MTV told them to.
The PG-13 script is as family friendly has you're going to get with the undead these days. The fact that Vampires do not kill their victims in this case is the next logical step in Hollywood's long and shallow moralizing of killer creatures of the night. Only the Vampaneze (seriously, try saying it out loud and not cringing) do any killing in these novels. Why be conflicted about characters you like, when you can just emasculate them into shoulder-suckers
The movie is almost impressively brisk, with no real slow stretches of morbid contemplation - no homilies on last sunrises or the anguishing over ending life to survive. Darren and Crespley's morality is never up for question.
But this brevity is also one of the film's larger
weaknesses. In the name of speed, Weitz has forgone a fair share of traditional
exposition, sometimes necessary when introducing an audience to a fleshed-out
world of 12 books. I was confused at times by who and what a character
was, and why they were making choices based on past actions, obviously
explained further in the novels.
The cast has quite a few bright spots, including Salma Hayek's chest, brightly displayed with corsets for her fairly bland bearded-lady/psychic character. Orlando Jones, Jane Krakowski and the aforementioned Fugit all pop up as members of the freakshow. Even Willem Dafoe gets in on the action with a glorious makeup line around his neck. The real scene-stealer, however, is easily Ray Stevenson as Murlough, the Vampaneze enforcer of the film's under-explained evil Mr. Tiny. It took me a while to realize Titus Pullo was biting people on screen, but the epiphany made the movie infinitely more enjoyable.
Reilly is an engaging and believable vampire mentor to Darren, and looks good enough in lace cravats and Victorian smoking jackets to carry the movie for chaperones not necessarily into tales of teen angst and blood sucking. But this film will not reach the sexually-repressed heights as the Twilight movies, or even the hedonistic success of HBO's Trueblood. But, if I had them, I would take my kids to it.
