Film Review with Robert Mann – Vampires Suck

16th October 2010

Vampires Suck ½

You may have hoped the genre was dead. And, following the debacle of Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, you may even have thought that it actually was but regrettably the spoof movie is alive and well and the guys who inflicted those previous two crimes against cinema – Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer:
“the guys who couldn’t sit through another vampire movie” yet evidently could go out and make one of their own so much worse than any of the others out there – onto unsuspecting (or maybe very suspecting given the alarming number of people who actually like these movies) cinemagoers are back with their latest ‘comedy’ to cash in on the good names of real blockbuster movies, their sights this time set on the insanely popular Twilight franchise while still throwing in ridiculous amounts of references to whatever happens to be popular as of late. That said, as film franchises to spoof go The Twilight Saga might just allow for some pretty good laughs…

Becca Crane (Jenn Proske) is a girl in the throes of teenage angst. Living with her embarrassing father Frank (Diedrich Bader) and starting at a new school in the drab little town of Sporks doesn’t help. But then she spots the deathly-pale Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter) parading around school and discovers that he is a vampire. Becca thinks she’s in love, but complications ensue when she meets muscular Jacob White (Chris Rigg), a guy who’s contractually obliged to remove his shirt every ten minutes and who turns out to be a werewolf. Becca finds herself torn between ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’ – how will she ever decide who is the man for her? Needless to say, it all comes to a head at the fabulous High School Prom!

Absolutely hilarious. A laugh out loud riot of a movie. One of the funniest films of the year. These are the kind of things you might hear if you read a review of Vampires Suck written by one of the apparently brain-dead youngsters at the screening of the film that I attended, the kind of cinema patrons who wouldn’t know a good film unless it came out of the screen 3D style and punched them in the face and even then would likely still consider total dreck like this to be totally awesome when it is, in actuality, completely abysmal. While most of the audience were their laughing their asses off – as clear an indication that today’s young cinemagoers have no taste in films as you’re likely to find – this critic was just bored. Looking past the painfully bad writing, with a plot that is just an inferior condensed rip-off of the first two Twilight movies and dialogue that is bad even at the best of times, there is simply little to laugh at in this so-called comedy. Tropes of current and recent popular culture (some vampire related, most not) are parodied and/or referenced left right and centre – among them True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alice in Wonderland, Dear John, He’s Just Not That Into You, Eat Pray Love, Jersey Shore, Gossip Girl, Wizards of Waverly Place, iCarly, One Tree Hill, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods, the Kardashians, the Jonas Brothers, George Clooney, Stephenie Meyers’ Twitter page, TiVo, Ben & Jerry’s and FOX News – but the majority are little more than throwaway references and gags that are completely irrelevant to anything and all but a few fail to raise as much as a slight giggle. And when those that do raise a giggle or two – three vampire baddies being confused for the Black Eyed Peas and a group of werewolves breaking into a musical number of It’s Raining Men’ are pretty much it – can be seen in the trailer for free, why even bother paying to see the film at all? Even those scenes aren’t laugh out loud funny and everything else is just cringe-worthy, occasionally even disgusting and gross. It doesn’t help much that there isn’t even any comic talent among the cast. Aside from Ken Jeong (playing head vampire Daro), whose once promising career is being flushed down the toilet at an alarming rate, there are no recognisable faces to be seen at all among the cast and out of everyone else there is no one with any actual comedy talent, although Jenn Proske is at least a reasonably likable screen presence. So, while this film offers up a few noteworthy zingers, it is one that should be avoided at all costs by anyone who actually has taste in films. It is so awful that it actually elevates the Twilight films themselves to the level of cinematic masterpieces by comparison and the only thing worse than sitting through it is doing so in an auditorium packed full of pre-pubescent teenagers (whose liking of the film virtually guarantees that we’ll be seeing more crimes against cinema just like this in the future – now there’s a horrifying thought) as I did. Simply put, Vampires Suck and so does this movie.

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Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

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