I am a fan of spoof movies; no really, I am! From “Airplane!” to “Top Secret! to “The Naked Gun” franchise to “Hot Shots,” much of my youth was spent laughing at spoof flicks, which is why I wish I could travel back in time now OR erase my memory and re-experience those films fresh now that I’m older. Why? Because for all the love of spoof flicks I have in my youth, I absolutely can’t stand them now, and I’m trying to figure out if the content nowadays is inferior or if I matured.
Well, maybe it’s not fair to say I can’t stand spoof flicks now, more like I can’t stand spoof flicks associated with writer-directors Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, save perhaps “Spy Hard” and the first “Scary Movie” (which I found hilarious on first viewing and now can’t seem to get into on subsequent viewings). Then again, the latter mentioned films were not solely Friedberg and Seltzer affairs. Anyway, folks that know me know that I like to make my own decisions about movies. This is why, despite so many arguments to the contrary, I eventually watched “Battlefield Earth” and “The Adventures of Pluto Nash.” So lest you think I’m just bandwagoning on to the critical dislike for this creative duo, I’ve also seen “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Disaster Movie” and now “Vampires Suck” for myself.
I know comedy is subjective, so grant me that “Vampires Suck” just did not make me laugh. It probably doesn’t help that, as a spoof on the “Twilight” franchise, it’s making fun of movies I also don’t enjoy, though for entirely different reasons. Sitting through the spoof version of the first two “Twilight” films is, in many ways, like sitting through the first two “Twilight” films all over again. Why? Because in order to spoof them, the movie needs to establish familiarity with the moments or scenes in the original movies that it is spoofing. The problem here is that the “Twilight” films are more hilarious by accident than “Vampires Suck” is on purpose, causing me to think of the originals more fondly than the spoof… making me a latent Twihard by default.
So I’m not going to say much more about this film, mainly because it didn’t make me laugh, and I actually don’t enjoy piling on the critical s**t towards Friedberg and Seltzer (because, really, I’d much rather spend my time talking about stuff I like). In that regard, if you really want to laugh at the “Twilight” franchise, head on over to RiffTrax.com and give those folks some dough to listen to their commentaries on “Twilight” and “New Moon,” because those are laugh-out-loud hilarious.
