I struggle to understand why Vampires Suck exists. It’s the new film by the people who brought us the Scary Movies as well as Date Movie, Meet The Spartans et al. and pillages, as its treasure chest of lampooning potential, the first two Twilight films (a saga I actually quite like). What results is less 24-carat comedy gold and more botched-job diamante. It really is a toothless, anemic watch, which is a better gag than you’ll get in the entire eighty minutes.
Part of its problem is that it re-hashes jokes we all made minutes after having seen its source material, and deems it acceptable to box them up, tell them two years later, fluffing the punchlines. So, we get a T.V. Burp style brawl between Teams Edward and Jacob, Twilight‘s clunky vampire running sequences are converted to Segway joyriding, the re-named Sullens (the only semblance of creativity identifiable in the whole film) hold the Birthday party for Bella that escalates a paper-cut into an all-out bloodbath, and Jacob reveals that the reason for his apparent willingness to take his shirt off every ten minutes is… that it’s written in his contract for him to take his shirt off every ten minutes – a joke Valentine’s Day made over half a year ago. Hardly cutting-edge comedy then.
Needless to say, it’s nowhere near as verbally or visually witty as Airplane, or as imaginatively parodic as Monty Python. Vampires Suck is a black hole of humourless escapades, and does in fact suck quite a lot. In one such painfully unfunny segement, ‘spoofing’ Edwards’s trip to Rio in New Moon, the surly chap is seen watching Kurt Neumann’s original 1958 version of The Fly, and I instantly wanted to vacate the cinema and do the same.
1/10
