Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant

108 Minutes

Some free advice, people who made Cirque du Freak: the Vampire’s Assistant: More freaks, less vampires. Is there anything more painful than watching a movie that desperately wishes to be a completely different film? How about wishing the same? Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is–strangely, appropriately–a Siamese twin who wants to separate from its other, worse half. Obviously this doesn’t happen, because otherwise I’d be happy. So instead I’m reviewing two movies.

The Vampire’s Assistant is a movie concerned with building its own fucked-up vampire mythology, which I’m going to relate to you because I’m feeling vengeful. So Vampire John C. Reilly invented a new method of vampirism where the undead just knock out their victims and suck enough blood to live off of without killing. This created a schism in the vampire world, so you have the peacenik vampires at war with the vampaneze, who’d really much prefer to kill their victims if that’s all right with you.

Also, there’s some fat guy pulling the strings. See? Now you understand my confusion.

So there are two teenagers that involved in this whole thing, one of whom is a bizarro clone of Wil Wheaton who sounds perpetually congested while the other is that little shit from Zathura, grown into a slightly bigger little shit. Bizarro Wil Wheaton steals a spider from Vampire John C. Reilly, which bites that little shit from RV. So Bizarro Wil Wheaton agrees to become Vampire Reilly’s assistant in order to get the antidote to save his best friend who totally doesn’t deserve it. To be his assistant, Reilly turns him into a half-vampire, which means lots of boring vampire mythology scenes where Bizarro Wil Wheaton learns how to be a vampire and that there was a schism centuries ago that put vampire against vampire or something.

That’s right. I said half-vampire. As in, “Don’t worry, you’ll only be half-vampire. So you can walk around during the day.” You can tell Reilly is half-assing it because his delivery makes it sound like he’s joking (he’s not). There’s also a choice moment where he knocks out a farmer with his breath and casually remarks, “Vampires exhale a gas that knocks out humans.” You’d think having Reilly as a vampire would be fun, but it’s a mostly straight performance which we won’t appreciate for another 15 years.

The performances of the two main kids are even worse/better. They seem like a secret gay couple, considering the way the little shit from Bridge to Terabithia (who is totally unconvincing as a rebellious kid from a broken home) gets all hot under the collar upon finding out that Bizarro Wil Wheaton (who is totally convincing as a bizarro clone of Wil Wheaton) lies about their friendship to his parents. Bizarro Wil Wheaton himself is a total pedo: any time he gets uncontrollable blood lust it’s around a little girl, including his sister.

I was convinced that Universal forced screenwriters Paul Weitz and Brian Helgeland to shoehorn fucked-up vampire mythology into what should have been a weird, twisted movie about a freak show, but it turns out the books are like this. There’s four trilogies of vampires and vampaneze and who-gives-a-shit.

Also, the main character hardly does any vampire assisting.

It’s not clear if the freak show is a traveling affair or if it’s in one place and occasionally decides to come into town only to be run out every single time. What’s important is that there are freaks, and they are fun–there’s a bearded lady fortune teller, a midget with a really tall forehead, a girl with a monkey tail, a guitar-playing lizard boy and a guy with a very emaciated torso. The whole collection of freaks creates a Star Wars “Jabba’s palace” affair where you see all sorts of cool design ideas in the background that never come into play, like the guy with the inordinately big nose that shows up every few shots.

There’s also some strange bits of safeness in Cirque du Freak–Salma Hayek’s bearded lady often appears beardless but can grow her beard at will. So the pretty lady stays pretty throughout the movie instead of being a full-fledge freak. I imagine if this were in the hands of a proper director the whole thing would be twisted and subversive, instead of merely weird but safe.

Instead we have Weitz, whose bland, unimaginative direction ruins everything that happens on screen, which is unfortunate for Cirque du Freak but it also points out who the bad Weitz brother is. I’m not sure what interests the director of In Good Company has, but I don’t think they lie with boring vampire mythology or cool freak show movies. More likely, Paul Weitz heard that Chris got a job directing the Twilight sequel and wanted a franchise of his own because it would increase his heat or some such Hollywood bullshit. Leave the genre stuff to Guillermo, keep directing crap comedies and leave us the hell alone.

For The Vampire’s Assistant, however, his direction is wonderful because it’s so awful. In 15 years the film where John C. Reilly played a pseudo brooding vampire will become a camp classic. So now we play the waiting game for the day when Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant becomes watchable.

by Danny Djeljosevic