Continuity Errors Don’t Suck, Vampires Do

Vampires Suck starts out with a girl conking another girl in the head with a shovel, which might be the highlight of the movie. The story’s pretty straightforward: If you’ve ever seen any one of the other red-text monochrome-background date movie, epic movie, scary movie, and disaster movie movies Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have written, you’ll know exactly what to expect. “Becca” (heh) goes down to “Sporks,” Washington (hoho!), and meets Edward “Sullen” (HAHA!) and falls in “love” with him (HA! HA! Wait, what?). Suddenly, an hour and 20 minutes has gone by, and you’re gradually regaining consciousness.

The film is actually pretty engaging for the first 20 minutes or so: The bar was set so low that I could only be surprised by the few clever quips that emerged. Parodies (and B-comedies) can deliver straight-up continuity errors for the sake of a background joke—think of Igor’s moving hump in Young Frankenstein. Wheelchair Werewolf Guy is crippled and makes a few jokes about feeling nothing below the waist (like, HIS DICK), but then we see him kicking Becca’s dad in the head during a comedy fight scene. Details in wackyland don’t matter and we can do whatever for the sake of a joke, and that’s okay! The only important thing is the brief blip of humor as you idly drift along the surface of the film. Did you see Jacob’s row of hairy teats?! And the way Becca tries to commit honorable seppuku by riding a motorcycle and drinking milk! (She’s lactose intolerant! By the way: The girl who plays her, Jenn Proske? She elevates the actual Bella’s angst to its Platonic form of hair-fidgeting and emotive-lip-biting. Nice.) Okay, laugh NOW! GET IT? YOU GOT IT, RIGHT?

But, after those bronze-medal opening minutes, the brief adventure in Sporks, Washington, fails to register on any level. Moments glide by like patches of crude oil on water. There’s a fart joke. Memo: Blazing Saddles has officially killed all fart jokes forever in cinema by finding the zenith. (How do you spell a fart noise? I’m still taking suggestions.) No boundaries are pushed, no lasting comedy produced. For a movie belonging to a genre primarily based on quality gags, Vampires Suck needs to come up with something a little sharper than a potato-flavored mash of shallow pop references. They will become dated within a few months. They already feel tired.

Here’s an analogy for you: When I was 12 and the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out, my brother and I decided we’d put together a parody film in which Pippin dies in every scene, and Gandalf becomes totally incoherent when anybody says “ring,” and Legolas is in fact legless. Right? Funny? We never made the movie, because it was a movie that should never be made. It wasn’t for anyone else but us and our 12-year-old sense of humor. Similar instructions to follow for Vampires Suck: It would be far easier, cheaper, and much, much funnier to rent Twilight, get drunk, and punctuate it with your own jokes. It’s not worth outsourcing your sense of humor to the laziest frat boys in Hollywood.