Vampires Suck

I was a big fan of the Naked Gun movies back in the day. As I was fighting the urge to get up and leave during Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer‘s Vampires Suck, I began to doubt myself. Was Leslie Nielsen really as funny as I remember him? Or did I just happen to be the right age to appreciate that kind of humor? I was seeing a similar scattershot approach here that I remembered from the Naked Gun series, with a lot of physical humor and literalizations. It just wasn’t funny. But a quick search on YouTube reassured me. Perhaps the hit/miss ratio of the jokes has lowered a bit for me personally, but Leslie Nielsen was the epitome of sophistication compared to what Friedberg and Seltzer dare put in front of us. Zucker, Zucker & Abrahams’ work has stood the test of time surprisingly well. This movie thankfully will not.

I’m not going to waste your time with a description of the plot of Vampires Suck. It is illustrative of the laziness of the makers that they didn’t bother to go beyond a “scene-by-scene retread of the first two movies in the [Twilight] franchise” (Frank Scheck). It’s this laziness that pervades all aspects of this film: from the “gags that barely even try for humor” (Adam Markovitz) to the current pop culture references that deliberately shorten the movie’s lifespan (because… please tell me that the Kardashians and Jersey Shore will have been forgotten in a few years’ time). Yes, a few of the more physical jokes do get a laugh. But there are just as many that make you cringe, especially the ones involving Becca’s dad (Becca, played by Jenn Proske, being the stand-in for Bella). Yet considering the success of their earlier efforts, the director-screenwriters know exactly what they’re aiming for, “clearly aware of their target audiences’ lack of sophistication” (Frank Scheck).

The Twilight saga was not really in need of a sendup. Jeannette Catsoulis notes how it “has always been winkingly aware of its own angsty excesses”. In that sense, the source material has much more sophistication than this dreadful attempt at parody.