No.Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant may have been, like, a billion times better than I had expected it to be... but that isn't saying much.
The movie is Harry Potterish in tone, just replace wizards with carnies and a castle with a circus camp site. The movie is filled with conflict that appears out of nowhere. The main character who is so obsessed with spiders that he has the balls to sneak into the dressing room of a vampire to steal his pet really isn't all that believable. At the same time, unbeknownst to the main character, his best friend, who all of a sudden has this horrible life, with a dead dad and a drunk mom, who can't take it anymore and so wants to become a vampire, sneaks into the vampire's room to provoke said vampire into turning him. The film maker's should have spent more time exploring the friends family background before this confrontation, instead of springing it on us out of the blue. If you never get to know the characters through experiencing their situations with them, it's difficult to develop an emotional connection with them and is then impossible to care about the rest of their journey.
The rest of the problems stem, I assume, from the book. "Vampanese"? Come on, is that really the extent of your imagination? In this story, vampanese are the dangerous versions of vampires. But in all of folklore, vampires are dangerous... number 1: Wouldn't it have made more sense to have had the "nice vampires" change their category to something else so that they wouldn't be associated with such a horrible creature?... #2 Vampanese? That has to be one of the laziest, least imaginative creature names I've ever heard. It sounds like the author was stumped and asked his 6 year old kid for an idea.
This is the beginning of a saga, apparently. Hopefully it will fall the way of Eragon and never be continued. If you have kids who have read the books, you may get stuck sitting through this, and to be honest, it really isn't completely unbearable. Otherwise, don't waste your money.
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