Vampires Suck Staff Review
Doing a parody of a movie is a fairly simple feat. Take a movie, especially a popular movie and use any moment during the film to poke fun as the obvious flaws of the original while dropping in other pop culture references to use as side humor. This kind of thing started back in the 90's with the parody of Scream, Scary Movie. That film started off a chain of films that would poke fun at just one movie or combine a few different elements of a select group of movies to make a new film.
Vampires Suck is the latest installment in that very long franchise of movie parodies. This time around they are jumping on the large number of vampire related shows, movies, and books that have cropped up in the past couple of years. The movie focuses mainly on the mania over the Twilight line of books and movies that have grabbed the mainly female public by storm. The movie combines the first two Twilight movies (Twilight & New Moon) into one ninety minute film. It follows the adventures of Becca who leaves her sunny existence in Nevada to live with her father in the small town of Sporks, located just outside of Seattle.
On her first day of school Becca makes some new friends and is introduced, from afar, to the Sullen family. Edward Sullen is the youngest and most brooding of them all and of course Becca is immediately drawn to him. It doesn't take her long to figure out that Edward is a vampire and of course she doesn't care, isn't scared and is totally in love with him. Edward does his best to keep Becca from getting hurt but accidents and bad luck just seem to follow her around, probably because she continues to not think things through.
Vampires Suck isn't the most original idea for a parody; true it is easy to poke fun at pop culture and the current vampire hysteria makes it really easy. At this point movie audiences have become so used to the obvious jokes and sight gags that it all seems like white noise at this point. What these kinds of parodies should do is take a page from the king of all parodies, Airplane! That movie didn't simply take a already written story and add jokes. It simply mocked the genre (airplane disaster movies) and come up with its own original story.
The DVD release of Vampires Suck includes both the theatrical and untrated versions of the film, along with some great deleted scenes and a on-the-set gag reel.
While it is fun to parody what is most popular in culture, or even point out the absurdity of it, it takes a little more effort for to be heard. Especially by audiences of today who are so used to vulgarity, obscenity and crudeness, you either need to be the most offensive person who has ever lived or simply bring a fresh take to something that already exists. Vampire's Suck certainly does what it sets out to do and that is to mock the current obsession with all things vampire related but that's all it does. And if you want to make waves with an audience you can't just tread water.
--Chris Rebholz
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Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
