"A spoof of vampire-themed movies, where teenager Becca finds herself torn between two boys. As she and her friends wrestle with a number of different dramas, everything comes to a head at their prom."
Although "Vampires Suck" is clearly aimed at all the "Twilight" haters and doesn't really go much further than spoofing the entire first "Twilight" movie with some parts of "New Moon" thrown in, it's not totally without a few merits of its own.
The most obvious thing is that everybody does such brilliant impersonations of the real "Twilight" characters that it's often difficult to tell if this is actually a comedy or not. If you haven't seen "Twilight", you could watch this and and still go on to enjoy the official sequels with no problem at all. Jenn Proske (as Becca Crane) could be Kristen Stewart's Bella even though she's actually slightly prettier.
This attention to detail may be the parody's undoing though. There is a very thin line between what is an acceptable parody and obvious copyright infringement, but we'll just have to wait and see what Stephanie Meyer's lawyers make of it all. Personally, I think this is way too close to simply being a "Twilight" remake in all but name. It looks the same, the characters have 99% identical names, and the story is just far too close to the original for comfort even if everything is clearly played for laughs.
"Vampires Suck" isn't particularly funny though. There are a couple of amusing scenes but that's all they are, just amusing not side-splittingly funny. I'm not big on comedies anyway so it may be funnier to some people than it was to me, but I just didn't think there was anything here that can't already be found on YouTube in smaller doses. If you've ever heard a joke or seen any kind of amusing image lampooning "Twilight" or the Twihards themselves then it's repeated here. It seems that it's all by the same team who did "Epic Movie" and "Meet the Spartans", but since I've never seen either of those films and have no intention of ever watching them, I can't tell you whether this is any better or worse than those. It isn't as good as the last "Scary Movie" that I watched, but I don't think very much of that franchise anyway.
I did like that "Vampires Suck" had really good production values. There's nothing worse than watching an obviously low-budget parody especially when you don't like low-budget movies in the first place. As I mentioned, this really has a lot of attention to detail and it's possible to argue that this is probably how "Twilight" and "New Moon" should have been done in the first place especially when it comes to pacing. At around 70 minutes long, it all flies by with not too many lags. If you discount the two or three somewhat feeble pop-culture references which will date this film horribly in a few years then it isn't too bad at all.
Just because the actors in this did a much better job than the real cast of "Twilight", I am actually going to recommend "Vampires Suck". If you don't like comedies then you should avoid it. It's not a horror film, it's not scary, gory or even as funny as the "South Park" episode about emos, but it is an amusing and completely throwaway diversion.
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