Becca (Jenn Proske) and Edward (Matt Lanter) wait in vain for laughter in "Vampires Suck".

Becca (Jenn Proske) and Edward (Matt Lanter) wait in vain for laughter in "Vampires Suck".

There is probably no other movie franchise out there today in more dire need of parody than the Twilight series. From the tops of its sparkly vampire head to the tips of its sullen Mary-Sue toes, everything about the series screams, “RIDICULE ME!” So, it was to my great delight when I found out that someone was going to do just that. There was much joy in Mudville for more than a few of my genre cronies and myself at the news. OK, so it was being made by the same soulless bastards who squeezed out such cinematic rectal prolapses like “Epic Movie”… and “Date Movie”… and “Disaster Movie” ands gods help us all, “Meet the Spartans”. As I’ve said before – and have sometimes have to be reminded – you can’t always judge a movie by the director’s previous work.

Just look at Uwe Boll… O.K., bad example.
M. Night Shamaylan.
Crap.

Well, it seems that the point being made for me is that sometimes you can. “Vampires Suck”, which compresses the activities of the first two movies into one bland, corn-filled turd, is a monument to Hollywood hackery, an unfortunate anchievement in unfunny. Sadly, these movie will continue to make money as long as there are twelve year-olds with nothing else to do with their allowance but to go see something… anything at the multiplex.

What we have here is the equivalent of that one friend, relative or co-worker who has the comic sensibilities of a wet gym sock but solidly insists that he is funny. Hell is an evening hemmed in by this guy in a distant corner of a party as he regales you with his singular wit. What writers/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer had here was a drunken prom date: a sure thing. All they had to do was lampoon two movies that were both so very lampoonable. If they were having problems thinking of things, all they had to do was search the internet: the funny is out there.

It just wasn’t in this movie.

And, given the cast, it’s kind of a shame. It’s the one thing that didn’t let this movie down. Newcomer Jenn Proske does a dead on Kristen Stewart, down to that perpetually constipated look that shrouds her face in “Twilight” and “New Moon”. In addition, she looks damn nice in a light-up leather bikini. Matt Lanter (a survivor of “Disaster Movie”) pulls off a pretty good Robert Pattinson as well, but really all he has to do is be pale and stalkery. Chris Riggi (“Gossip Girl”) is probably the luckiest of the lot scoring one of the few knowing chuckles I managed during the movie. The rest of the cast ranges from the annoying to the perplexing. But that’s no fault of the actors; the blame for that falls squarely on the script. Not that it should come as a surprise to anyone since it’s essentially the same script they’ve done for every movie they’ve done together.

Find a concept.
Get a few good concept-based jokes
Fill the rest of the movie with ridiculously bad pop culture reference jokes.
Beat the audience senseless with the bad jokes.

And there is absolutely NO motivation for them to do anything else. As long as the movies can be made inexpensively and continue to rake in the bucks at the box office, they’ll never get any better. Friedberg and Seltzer will continue with their comedy clocks stuck firmly in 1980 waiting, like a brain tumor, for the next fad to pick up on to spread their misery. Maybe for their next film, they should just avoid any pretense and just call it “Shitty Movie”. It’s not like we don’t know that’s what we’re getting already