So far, the Twilight films have been extremely disappointing and they have all received pretty low ratings from me. I decided to check out Vampires Suck, thinking it would be a good laugh. Unfortunately, I could count the amount of times I laughed on one hand.

The film was full of cheap gimmicks, badly written lines that were not even close to being funny and actually, much like the Twilight films themselves, terribly structured with mass chunks of uneventful time filling.

The lead actress is a fantastic Kristen Stewart impersonator – literally every twitch, facial expression and bodily movement is spot-on. Even her voice is extremely similar! Having never seen her in anything else however, it remains to be seen how far her acting skills actually stretch.

There is really nothing much to comment on, simply because there was nothing in the film that was really worth noting. Don’t bother seeing this one – simply AWFUL!

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are the single worst filmmakers currently working in the realm of mainstream cinema. This pair of writers/directors is responsible for single-handedly destroying the parody genre. I consider their third film, Meet the Spartans, to be the single worst movie of the last decade – one which gave us a dozen well known and lesser known treasures by Uwe Boll. But where Boll shows ambition and dare I say, “style”, Friedberg and Seltzer exhibit laziness and a lack of purpose. These two hacks throw in dated pop culture references and steal the work of others, and seem to get away with calling it comedy.

It is funny to note then that their first movie in two years, Vampires Suck, is a parody riffing on the Twilight series. The duo gleefully crib from Twilight and New Moon, providing us with the tale of new girl Becca (Jenn Proske) who falls in love with the vampire Edward (Matt Lanter), and all the problems that come with their newfound romance.

My immediate question, before even beginning to try and discuss this waste of time, is why did Friedberg and Seltzer ever think it was a good idea to make a parody of the Twilight series? The films are unintentionally hilarious as it is. And True Blood has been on for three seasons now, and for all intents and purposes, it is merely a darkly satirical and much more adult version of Twilight. So right off the bat, these two brilliant minds are mining at something that has already been done. I guess it was money, but who would knowingly believe Twilight fans would rush out to see a movie bashing their beloved franchise much less the haters who would not be caught dead seeing the film as it is?

It just seems overly baffling to me, what could possibly have made anyone think this film is a good idea. It recycles the unintentional jokes from the series, and packages them in a way that either rips them off lightly or just come off as not being anywhere near as funny as they were before. I chuckled at a few parts here and there, but they were only mild chuckles. There is nothing inherently funny or stands out as being hilarious at any given point in the film. Perhaps Friedberg and Seltzer are laughing – but no one else is laughing with them. I had the good fortune of not having to see this movie in a theatre, but I can imagine the film’s showings are silent enough that the filmgoers can hear the projector whirling more than they can hear anyone laughing.

I will give credit however in the fact that unlike their previous atrocities and crimes against cinema-goers all over the world, Vampires Suck does not deviate from its riffing of the Twilight. Characters still make dated pop culture references (is anyone in five years even going to remember The Kardashians? I barely know who they are now), but no one from other films is just thrown into the film at random. The film never stops to suddenly jump into making fun of another film or franchise (outside of a total throwaway blink-and-you-will-miss-it gag involving Alice from Alice in Wonderland). It stays consistent throughout, and to me, suggests a minor development of maturity on the parts of the filmmakers. Or of course, they realized there was nowhere they could possibly throw someone like Justin Bieber or Cobb from Inception, and not confuse the audience even more than they like already are.

But this consistency comes with a price. Instead of whipping by, the film runs at an incredibly slow pace. I fell asleep twice, and somehow barely missed anything. They do a fairly nifty job of condensing the first two films, but it seems like they did not do nearly enough editing and whittling down. The film easily could have felt a lot faster paced, but it stalls a bit too much in almost every scene. And for a film that runs less than eighty minutes, it speaks a lot for what these two filmmakers were trying to accomplish or even what they wanted to show. If they cannot answer that simple question to the filmgoing public, then what is the point of even making movies in the first place?

You will need to sift through the increasing amount of junk and waste in Vampires Suck, but Proske is actually fairly good in her role (her acting debut, sadly). She has the Kristen Stewart impression and mannerisms down perfectly, and she almost came off as a better Bella than Stewart ever has. She also has a commanding aura about her, which suggests she is in store for much greater work in the future. As long as she runs away from everyone involved here, I am sure she can prove this soon enough. Unlike her, no one else even remotely stands out or is even half decent in the cast (Ken Jeong and Diedrich Bader go to complete waste in supporting roles). They all just go through the motions, and are just as lazy and half-assed as everyone else. But then, why should they bother if the filmmakers do not even try?

Despite being a lot more balanced than any of their brethren, Vampires Suck is still an awful and truly unfunny film that only further proves the point that Friedberg and Seltzer need to stop making movies. Even with a great lead, they still manage to botch the making of this film and still suffer from many of the problems their earlier films were plagued by. Years from now, will anyone even remember these films? Better yet, will anyone want to remember these films?

2/10.

…thankfully for free. This movie is BAAAD! They even had the guts to show all the “highlights” (if there were any) in the trailer. Don’t be fooled by the name, this is one of those “Movie” movies (Disaster Movie, Epic Movie)! They clearly changed the name because the series got a bad name from being name some of the worst movies of all time.

Now, on to the movie. I didn’t laugh. There’s no original story. There really is nothing more you can say about this. It’s just bad. Really, really bad. There is no acting, they just said what they were told to say.

You honestly have to have to sense of humor of a 7 year old to find this rubbish funny. One other thing that really bugged me was the stock sound effects like the “Howie” scream and the Woman scream, both of which are burned into the brain of movie lovers and whenever one hears one, it feels like salt on an open wound.

Don’t watch this movie. It’s so, so bad. I’m honestly speechless that it’s so popular at the moment. It’s just so hard to describe how bad. Maybe if someone made you eat some really gone off eggs again and again, that might just come close to how bad this is.

After making the woefully regrettable decision to pay money to see “Epic Movie”, I had vowed to stay far away from this movie and any other with the word “Movie” in the title. But, because I am faint of heart and/or an idiot, I allowed myself to be talked into watching a leaked version online because A) it was actually pretty funny, according to friends who had seen it already, B) it was only about 70 minutes long, and C) this Edward was actually hot. After watching it for myself, I would agree on all three counts (especially C….daaaaamn). It’s no great cinematic achievement, but for a devoted Twilight hater such as myself, it was worth a chuckle or two.

Sure, “Vampires Suck” meets many of the same pitfalls other parody movies do. It operates under the delusion that anyone out of diapers thinks that a character being bludgeoned over the head time and time again for absolutely no reason is comedy gold. It often relies on stupid pop culture jokes (Look! A Jersey Shore reference! It’s funny because it is a Jersey shore reference!) and unoriginal gross-out humor (it’s funny because you want to vomit! Haha!). But, so help me if I didn’t find myself laughing at the way the film mercilessly mocks everything laughable about the Twilight movies, a series that, let’s face it, lends itself pretty easily to parody. In fact, all “Vampires Suck” really had to do was recreate the first two Twilight films pretty much scene-for-scene, tweaking here and there to make the scenes only slightly more ridiculous than the originals. The result is actually a pretty clever send-up of the ludicrously over-the-top melodrama that Twilight lovers eat up. This film holds a mirror up to pretty much everything laughable about the series that proves that a wildly successful book/movie franchise does not necessarily need a “plot”: the rabidity of its fan base; the shameless parade of shirtless males; the idea that teenage Stephanie Meyer…er, I mean, Bella, would be the object of every hot guy’s lust despite being a mopy sourpuss with no trace of a personality; the insistence that Robert Pattinson is “sexy”. The actress who plays Bella, or “Becca,” as she is renamed, does a killer job parodying Kristen Stewart’s mannerisms (hair-tucking, downward gazes, constant lower-lip biting) by which I mean she mimics them exactly and everyone laughs at them because they are stupid. Mocking Twilight is not exactly hard to do, but I have to say this film does it quite cleverly at many points. I’ll even say that the ending is magnificent.

Needless to say, “Vampires Suck” is for members of Team I Want a Boy Who Doesn’t Want to Kill Me only, as I’m sure Twilight fans would not appreciate being forced to acknowledge that the thing they love is dumber than a sack of fruit fly larvae. However, since like I said the movie is pretty much just a re-creation of the original Twilight movies, many of the jokes are best appreciated having actually seen them. So you’ll probably like this movie if you are not a Twilight fan, but have actually seen the movies because A) you were dragged there by a girl whose pants you really, REALLY wanted to get into, B) you were stoned, walked into the wrong theater, and failed to realize that it wasn’t The Hangover until it was too late, or C) you are self-loathing and willingly subjected yourself to them out of morbid curiosity (like me).

So if you hate Twilight and everything it stands for, take a break from your violent (yet strangely erotic) fantasies about Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner and go see “Vampires Suck”. It will ease your tortured soul, and maybe, just maybe, restore a molecule of faith in the parody genre. It couldn’t possibly be worse than “Meet the Spartans”.