Vampires Suck
Starring: Jenn Proske, Matt Lanter, Chris Riggi, Ken Jeong Directors: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer Category: IIB
Since 2006's Date Movie, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been making spoofs distinguished by a distinct lack of wit and inspiration, their commercial success hinging on their knack of pandering to the populist demand for mindless entertainment and base humour. Their latest offering, however, doesn't even deliver that.
Vampires Suck is a lazy satire that fails miserably in lampooning the shortcomings of the Twilight films; the result is as lame as the films it parodies, a tedious jumble of one-off gags guilty of many of the charges critics have made about the paranormal teenage drama series during the past three years.
Vampires Suck's opening sequence sets the bar for the quality of its jokes: there's the vampire Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter) going stark naked only to reveal a glitterball on his nether regions; two evil vampires slathering on sunscreen and swigging from 'True Blood' bottles; and Edward's love, Becca (Jenn Proske, above right), running towards her hunk only to find herself in the midst of a catfight between teenage girls wearing Team Edward and Team Jacob T-shirts. And then there are the coarse send-ups of the relationship between Becca and her father, her new classmates and of course the two boys (Edward and Jacob White the wolfman) vying for her affections.
What's most unsatisfactory about Vampires Suck is the way it plays on the obvious: knowingness and irony go out the window as the filmmakers have the characters repeatedly spew lines about their satirical moves (how romance is heightened by 'staring at each other in slow motion', for example) or cop-out scenes that make direct jabs at the Twilight films (such as when Becca and a classmate emerging from a Twilight screening and panning its storyline).
Add those to the fact that Vampires Suck spends most of its time replaying a compressed narrative of the first two Twilight films and you have a low-quality spoof that can easily be bettered by the shorts circulating on YouTube.
Vampires Suck opens today
