Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

So my man Desmond calls me up and says ‘Chris… need you to see this movie Vampire Sucks’. I’m familiar with this film and the filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer and so I respond to Desmond with ‘F**k off’ with the next voice he heard being my good friends Ms. Click and Mr. Dial-Tone. He calls me back, acting as if that never happened, and proceeds to beg me to cover this movie for the magazine since I am the official film critic for Decode Magazine. I explain to him, as clearly as I possibly can, that it would be pointless for me to watch and attempt to review this movie for a number of reasons. I haven’t seen a single ‘Twilight’ movie which this parody is spoofing and as such the jokes will be lost on me. More importantly, while I imagine Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg to be very nice people who are great husbands, good parents and take care of their mothers while paying their taxes, they’re terrible filmmakers. I’m not picking on these guys and that’s just not me saying this. It is rare that the film critic and the film watching communities come together in uniform to revile something so completely as this pair of ‘comedic’ film directors. I’m not even a legitimate film critic, as we have clearly established in these pages. I’m just some guy, just like you, who watches movies and has been thrust into the position of having to write about what he watches. I mention this because I believe this gives me an ‘out’ when it comes to watching stuff I really don’t want to see. Like this. But he continues to beg so to shut him up I go and watch the screener of this movie. Recognize that the Friedberg / Seltzer joints ‘Date Movie’, ‘Epic Movie’, ‘Meet the Spartans’, and ‘Disaster Movie’ are among the worst movies ever made by anybody ever and thus in my years of watching movies I have never entered a theater with lower expectations than I had entering this movie. Let’s not trip about it because ‘Vampire Sucks’ sucked ass. Completely. However with a combination of rock bottom expectations and preconceived notions of comedic incompetence… this movie did make laugh on occasion. This is far more than what I expected.

I not going to spend too much time talking about the actual movie itself, since I wasted so much time talking about why I didn’t want to go see this movie, but it is a parody of the first two Twilight movies which I haven’t seen. While initially I thought that would be a problem apparently Twilight has been so infused into modern pop culture that you don’t actually have to have seen these movies to know, with some certainty, what these movies are all about. This makes it pretty easy to get behind actress Jean

Proske’s version of Kristin Stewart’s Bella Swan, renamed Becca Crane here… Swan, Crane… get it? But observing Ms. Proske aping Kristin Stewarts unique acting method which largely involves the young lady moving her hair behind her right ear was pretty amusing. I remember watching Ms. Stewart in that movie Panic Room when she was like 8 years old and I believe she was shifting her hair in that movie too. Between Proske’s tortured angst, quivering lips and far off stares combined with Matt Lanter’s overly depressed version of Edward Cullen, those two kids managed to provide some entertainment value throughout this largely artless experience.

Like I mentioned earlier a couple of the sight gags did actually hit their mark. Now they are far and few between so I won’t tell you what these were in case you actually go to see this movie and want to experience them for yourself, but they do hit their mark. Toss in the Diedrich Bader factor… I have found in my limited experience that when making something that’s supposed to be funny, having somebody who is actually funny around usually helps and Diedrich Bader is a funny dude.

Now despite the fact that ‘Vampires Suck’ does have a couple of laughs embedded within it’s mercifully short running time, the same problems that affect most of these guys spoof flicks are still here, just not quite as pronounced. There is still the heavy reliance on pop culture references, references that even if they were funny probably won’t be funny to a new audience ten years from now. A good example of this is the far superior spoof ‘Top Secret’ from some twenty five years ago which has a scene of a Ford Pinto getting tapped from the rear and then exploding. That was really funny back in 1984. When I showed that movie to my son, he didn’t get that joke since cars tend not to explode when getting in rear end collisions nowadays, unlike those good ol’ days when I was a kid. The caveat being that Top Secret didn’t really rely on a bunch dated references which is why the fourteen year old still laughed out loud throughout that flick. The pop culture references in Vampire Sucks were less cryptic than say in ‘Meet the Spartans’ so they were easier to get with, but Chris Brown, Lady Gaga, The Hills, Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of Atlanta had best be relevant in 2020 if somebody wants to laugh at this movie ten years from now.

The real problem with ‘Vampires Sucks’ is that it’s artless, unimaginative and lazy. This is an improvement. I’ve heard that Kim Jong Il projects ‘Date Movie’ in the North Korean Grand Plaza to show his starving citizens his representation of what America is all about, which is followed by these poor hungry people falling to their knees and thanking that God that they are not allowed to worship that they aren’t here. That’s what I heard. ‘Vampires Suck’ isn’t nearly as bad as that, though it still sucks plenty ass.