This has to do with being turned into the film’s titular assistant. (Not that it matters, but Steve also resents Darren, because he has an intact family and gets good grades and is reportedly popular in school this resentment is figured into that vengeance plot somewhere down the franchise line.)ĭarren would rather avoid the bad stuff, being a very nice boy, but, well, he does attend the freak show, and so must pay a kind of price. The show, located on some “wrong” side of the boys’ nondescript hometown, thrills them no end Not only does Darren fall utterly in love with Madame Octa (“She’s beautiful!”), to the point that he steals her from Crepsley’s dressing room and hides her the next morning in his locker, but also encounters bearded lady/seer Madame Truska (Salma Hayek), whose vision of his future is all ooky shadows and illegible close-ups, and loses Steve to a dark side, that is, his hope to ditch his loser-life and become a vampire, so he can wreak revenge on all the kids and teachers who were mean to him. Consider the nonentity posing as protagonist, Darren (Chris Massoglia), the pretty boy who has a self-proclaimed obsession with spiders and a best friend, Steve (Josh Hutcherson), thumb-nailed as having an equally unmotivated “obsession with vampires.” Darren’s voiceover provides all you need to know about these high school classmates, whose stumbling on an after hours freak show serves as “rising action.” Make that “desperately-sought-after franchise.” Not a thing in this movie is subtle, from its cheesy special effects to its by-the-numbers storyline to its cardboard cutout characters. Drawn from the popular novels by Darren Shan, it has “potential franchise” written all over it. It’s a little too easy to see the latter in Paul Weitz’s film. Of course it could be coincidence, that Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant offers up a central emblem of “freak-ness” designed to appeal to the boys who buy all things Spidey. She’s big and fuzzy and fast, lives in a cage and does tricks for her master, the scar-faced, redheaded vampire Larten Crepsley (John C.
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