Team Edward and Team Jacob can unite in hatred of lazy spoof

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This article was published 18/8/2010 (3375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It's been two whole years since the team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer subjected us to one of its godawful parodies.

Alas, the vacation is over.

In 2008 the two shlockmeisters gave us the bad-and-worse Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans, and one would hope they would have had the decency to take the money and scoot into a comfortable early retirement, somewhere where they could sit on a beach and tell each other fart jokes while engaging in the onanistic pleasures of reality TV fare such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians viewed on their laptops.

No such luck. The Twilight Saga franchise, with its brooding teen heroine, its immaculately groomed dreamboat vampires and its buff werewolves, proved to be too much of a temptation. Friedberg and Seltzer are all over it like flies on pop crap.

The title Vampires Suck signals the boys haven't lost their penchant for the agonizingly obvious joke. This crass little burlesque is full of lines any underachieving ninth-grader might have dreamed up if sufficiently bored.

Twilight's Bella becomes Becca (Jenn Proske), the new girl in the town of Sporks. She is immediately attracted to Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter), the pasty-faced male model-hunk who stalks her school with an aura of supernatural sensuality, even as Becca's favours are sought with equal fervour by the lupine Jacob White (Chris Riggi).

Given the two-year gap since their last movie, one might have expected Friedberg/Seltzer might have made more of an effort and come up with some quality gags in the vein of their comedic forefathers the Zucker brothers (Airplane, The Naked Gun).

But for the most part, the jokes just spew lazily forth with no evidence whatsoever of inspiration or even token effort: Hey, let's name Twilight's "Jacob Black" character "Jacob White." I bet there were high fives going around when they came up with that comedic gold nugget.

But listen, I'm getting kind of tired of dissing Friedberg and Seltzer yet again, so I'm going to break the habit and say something nice about their movie: Newcomer Jenn Proske actually does a decent job of replicating Kristen Stewart's tentative, halting line readings and hair tosses.

That wasn't easy, but I managed to make the effort. Please reciprocate, Messrs Friedberg and Seltzer.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MOVIE REVIEW

Vampires Suck

Starring Jenn Proske and Matt Lanter

Grant Park, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne.

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1 out of five stars

 

 

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Vampires Suck.

 

A characteristic work of monumentally lazy spoof comedy by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, Vampires Suck confirms Idiocracy's prediction of modern man's devolution from humdrum mediocrity to sub-caveman levels of intelligence.

— Ed Gonzalez, Slant magazine

 

It is the latter word in the title that most accurately describes the film: suck.

— Dustin Putman, dustinputman.com

 

Generally goes out of its way to be one of the worst, most shamelessly slapdash films of 2010. But I'm sure you already knew that.

—Brian Orndorf, brianorndorf.com

 

This is from the morons who brought us Epic Movie, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans. Do I need to explain myself any further? Do I really?

— Felix Vasquez Jr., Cinema Crazed

 

— Compiled by Shane Minkin