Don’t you love (and read) lists? There they are, just to be wrong and get all worked up about. If we see movies to get anxious and get relieved (it’s like massage, only dirty), we buy newspapers and read blogs so we can get angry and foam about how wrong they are (as opposed to say, the occasional reporting of an actual event. Sorry, including the occasional reporting of an actual event), only to feel relieved at the end at our righteousosity. When they contradict us, facts are dangerous enough, but opinions, well…those are serious.

And no, Fright Night 3D is not a great movie. And no, as I hinted in the title, I’m not going to talk about the ten great films that ruined cinema forever. It’s more about the way in which iconic films transform the landscape, and then spoil it, the way in which the Neutras and Schindlers of the world made cool looking buildings, until a bunch of developers thought, hey, square buildings. Cheap and easy to make. Let’s put them everywhere. The fact that flat roofs leak like crazy and cause the building to be torn down every 10 years, that’s just a happy coincedence. Well, they didn’t have to live in them, did they?

Likewise, films like The Matrix, Silence of the Lambs, and Psycho, were all great, but spawned pointless copycats that didn’t understand what made them what they were. No one looked at SotL (I talk about that film a lot, so I’m just going to save all the typing I wasted in this parenthetical abbreviating it) and said, hey, let’s make strong narrative structure with motivated characters that act intelligently according to their situation.

No, instead they made ‘genius’ serial killer movies. You may not remember the swath of SotL clones, (so many that they culminated in the bizarre Mr. F. Murray Abraham appearance in Loaded Weapon 1), but they all starred Ms. Ashley Judd, and her de facto replacement, Ms. Angelina Jolie. Remember them now? For a second you did, and then you repressed it again.

These films were ironically ruined by another great film, Psycho, which, instead of teaching filmmakers that you could get away with killing the main character in the middle of the movie (which no one has done before or since, except for, naturally enough, the 1998 remake, and you know what? It still works), they thought we have to surprise the audience. There has to be a twist.

Or at the beginning. He could have started at the beginning.

Turns out you can only do this once. If you do it all the time, well, it’s kind of like an addiction isn’t it? The first one makes you want to stay there forever, tasting color, and happy as a Christmas sprint down the stairs. But soon after that you’re lying in your own filth amongst the discarded Kiss The Girls wrappers and The Tourist special editions, just chasing the (Red) Dragon. La piel que habito, the first bad Almodovar movie in the last twenty years, was ruined by surprise addiction, where an interesting premise is inert-fied by they way in which the film is structured to shock us, instead of explore the ramifications for the characters. The old Almodovar would have started at the end.

Fright Night 3D may not merit an entire article, but it is interesting as part of a funny historical arc that began, yes, with Star Wars. You may not remember the ponderous blockbusters of that time, the various World War II epics and Barbara Streisand sing-offs, but George Lucas, like everyone else, thought they were boring. So he made something different. And then everyone copied him. And then he copied him, or, even more likely, copied the copies, making films that someone needs very desperately to rebel against. Well, he doesn’t have to watch them, does he?

Incidentally, the limited edition of 3D glasses for Harry Potter 7.2 are very comfortable. Well, something good had to come out of it.

The point being that Hollywood has been making genre films for so long, they have become the ponderous crap that George Lucas and Steven Speilberg and Sam Raimi were rebelling against, instead of the fun distractions they were always meant to be. Fright Night 3D is an entertaining surprise, and a surprise by being entertaining, putting in in the top five of 2011, by the way. The characters are quick, they say funny things, and there’s enough good gags not to be bored. It doesn’t take itself seriously without being achingly self-aware. It’s very much like Pirannha 3D and My Bloody Valentine 3D, all sneaking under the radar and all 3D, but for the purposes that 3D is, you know, stupid, and not ‘the next step in the evolution of film entertainment.’

We could blame it on age, priorities, laziness or the lies that success told the filmmakers, but it doesn’t really matter. The occasional fun film represents what those old rebellious films and their makers forgot: when there’s so much riding on a lightweight film, it sinks to the bottom. Films like this are hardly a call to arms, but I hope, God how I hope, they’re a crack in the armor.