Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

It's getting downright batty trying to keep all these vampires straight. You have your traditional vampires (Nosferatu), your blond slayer foils (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), your sexy vamps (True Blood), your Euro children vampires (Let the Right One In), and your melancholy teenage variety (Twilight).

The latest entry to this overcrowded field is Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, which arrives with quixotic dreams of a franchise of its own. The source material this time is a series of young adult books known as Cirque du Freak or The Saga of Darren Shan, written by Darren O'Shaughnessy - who writes under his protagonist's name, Darren Shan.

We meet the world of "Cirque du Freak" through Darren (Chris Massoglia), a popular, straight-A high schooler whom his rebellious best friend, Steve (Josh Hutcherson), calls "Mr. Perfect." His parents lecture him on the path to a "happy, productive" life with the depressingly rigid mantra "College. Job. Family."

Though Darren is wide-eyed and naive, he harbors a love of spiders. Steve idolizes vampires. Darren shrugs that these obsessions are "in our blood" - and director Paul Weitz proves it to us with a zoom into Darren's capillaries, where little spiders dance.

Both get a front-row seat to their dark secrets when a traveling freak show comes to town. At the show, with the help of some digital effects, is a bearded lady (Salma Hayek), the very tall Mr. Tall (Ken Watanabe), a superthin man (Orlando Jones), a snake boy (Patrick Fugit), and others. The main attraction, though, is Crepsley (John C. Reilly), whom Steve recognizes as a vampire.

Reilly takes being a vampire seriously, but his best bits are his amusing scoffing at conventional vampire traits. He pronounces, "Vampires don't need cell phones!"

Such jokes are the highlights and suggest what the film could have been: an out-and-out comedy.

Instead, Cirque du Freak might be the single most overstuffed movie of the year. You have a high school film crossed with a vampire film crossed with a mutant film crossed with Willem Dafoe cameos.

The supernatural story (which even includes a cannibalistic Jane Krakowski) and its accompanying history of half-vampires and vampaneze never establishes itself as anything but ridiculous.

- Jake Coyle, Associated Press