Movies
Vampires Suck
“Ultimately, the most insulting thing about the film is that it was made, and made so poorly. You’d think mocking the Twi-films would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but Friedberg/Seltzer completely failed to mine the material for anything even approaching quality satire (the jokes are so predictable I actually called out a punchline 30 seconds before it occurred at one point).”
When I heard the latest spoof from Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, Vampires Suck, had been leaked to the internets a few weeks back, I considered downloading it just to see if it was an actual movie or another series of gags, assuming it would never be screened for critics (and I morally cannot condone paying for one of their films). But I forgot all about it and went on my merry way, until today, when I heard there was indeed a screening going on (not specifically for press, but there was a way to get in as press and not wait in line. We also got free concessions!). So let’s be clear: I saw this movie for free, with no hassle whatsoever, and was given a blank check for the candy line.
This movie is f*cking terrible.
I can actually tell you the number of times I laughed over the course of the 80 minute film: four. One really hard laugh (courtesy of Deidrich Bader, one of the only two actors I recognized – they couldn’t even get Carmen Electra to contribute her usual cameo), and three chuckles. The good laugh was pretty early on – when Bella tells her dad that she’s not a little girl anymore, he replies “I know, look at those tits!” – it was such a horribly out of line response that I couldn’t help but laugh. A mildly amusing sight gag involving her iPod playlists (including a song with lyrics like “I’m angsty, I’m so down…” or something) immediately followed, and I almost started to suspect that the movie might not be that bad after all.
Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh or smile again for another 20 minutes or so, despite an attempted joke every 15 seconds on average. The next time I laughed was Bader again, telling her that she wasn’t very pretty and would never get another dreamboat like Edward. This is why you hire a guy like Bader – hardly a comic genius but someone who can deliver a line – he can actually make this stuff amusing, unlike the rest of the cast. Even Ken Jeong is an embarrassment – I was hoping he’d rise above the material, but he actually comes off the worst in his 2-3 minutes of screentime, because you KNOW he can be funny.
Laugh #3 was basically stolen from “The Simpsons” (Bella and Jess walk out of a screening of Breaking Dawn and spoil the ending, much like Homer “spoiled” Empire Strikes Back in a flashback episode), but it was still funny. The fourth and final laugh occurred during the scene where Bella goes to the Cullen home (by the way, I’m using their real names, but in the movie, apart from Edward, they’re all slightly changed – Bella is Becca, Cullen is Sullen, etc), as they do the papercut gag and then milk it. This is the rare scene in the film that felt like a scene out of an 80s or 90s spoof (you know, the good ones), as it took something that happened for real and then took it to the extreme – she eventually fills a champagne glass tower with her blood, which Emmett and Carlyle take a glass from and sip gracefully. The biggest problem with these two ass-clowns is that their jokes often have no buildup whatsoever, so it’s nice to see them try, even if it was an obvious gag.
But for every joke that works, there are so, so many that don’t. Even though the bulk of the crowd seemed into it (even a simple fart joke went over like gangbusters), there were a lot that no one laughed at. I mean, yeah, even Airplane! has a few DOA jokes, but they can get away with it, considering how many work perfectly. It would be generous for me to say 2/3 of the jokes hit, with the other 1/3 not eliciting so much as a chuckle from this obviously easy to please crowd. Not to mention lazy – the lights were on at half-dim for the entire movie, no one complained.
Look! Idiots!
And I really hate how often they feel the need to explain their bad jokes, which just makes them worse. At one point Bella pulls out a guitar (this movie must set a record for characters pulling things out of thin air) and begins playing a corny ballad in an obvious parody of Taylor Swift. Yet, even if it was funny to begin with (it wasn’t), someone else in the scene says “Stop acting like Taylor Swift!” or something along those lines. Do they have so much contempt for their audience that they can’t even trust us to understand their obvious jokes? Or do they actually think that it’s funny to say the person’s name aloud? They did remove the Lady Gaga “identification” from the trailer, however – way to show restraint, guys.
The one nice thing I can say about it is that it stays on target for the most part, and keeps pop culture references to a decent minimum. The movie will be just as unfunny in 30 years, but 90-95% of the unfunny jokes are “timeless”, with the others destined to be puzzling for viewers in the next generation, who won’t know who the Kardashians or the Jersey Shore douchebags are. Instead, they actually stick to Twilight/New Moon for the film’s running time, with every scene in the film being a direct parody of one from the first two films (some, like Bella’s “depression” montage from New Moon, don’t even really play out any differently – if anything it was funnier in the real movie). Even when they do lapse into their usual “current” target jokes, they are kept to a minimum – Alice from Wonderland suddenly shows up in the woods, and Edward accidentally kills her moments later. Again, it’s not funny at all, but at least it has some semblance of a plot, instead of just a bunch of random gags (their last abortion, Disaster Movie, was largely made up of parodies of scenes from the TRAILERS for those films, because most of the films they were mocking weren’t even out yet when Friedberg/Seltzer were in production).
However, the fact that they stick to the material makes some of their choices odd. For example, why turn Jess into such a bitch/antagonist for Bella? It’s not funny in any way, and serves no function to the plot – I would think they could have had more humor in the way that (at least in the film) Bella seems to have no real attachment to these folks and ignores them more often than not. Also, there isn’t a single werewolf in the movie – Jacob turns into a chihuahua, and the other guys just dance around like Village People rejects. Guess doing the wolf effects would have sent their budget out of control. Or, more likely, they just didn’t care (witness Jacob’s long, rat-like tail instead of anything resembling that of a wolf. Or a chihuahua, for that matter).
I can give them some props for finding a terrific lead in Jenn Proske. She doesn’t improve on the material (enough to get a laugh anyway), but she’s endlessly watchable, and perfectly nails Kristen Stewart’s mumbly and introverted mannerisms. And she’s truly a new find – her IMDb has no other credits, not even a “Girl at bar” from some shit-com or a corpse on a procedural. Hopefully she can move on to bigger things (anything would be “better”) and leave this thing off her resume. Their location scout also did a fine job of matching the locales in the real films; I could have sworn it was the same town, but it wasn’t even the same state (the film was shot in Louisiana).
Ultimately, the most insulting thing about the film is that it was made, and made so poorly. You’d think mocking the Twi-films would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but Friedberg/Seltzer completely failed to mine the material for anything even approaching quality satire (the jokes are so predictable I actually called out a punchline 30 seconds before it occurred at one point). Someone with talent and brains could have made a really funny parody of the series, but instead we got this. I know – people found it funny, but these folks will obviously laugh at anything, so why not expand their target audience and put some f*cking effort into it? And I don’t know what the budget was, but their other films were all around 20 million – think of how many quality low budget horror films from legitimate filmmakers could have been made from that money. Hell, the studio could have picked up a few existing titles on the cheap and spent the rest of that 20 million on marketing/releasing them in theaters. Or given it to charity. Or eaten it. Instead, they spent it on this – and the sad thing is, the Twi-fans are likely to make it a hit just because it’s better than nothing while they wait for Breaking Dawn to hit.
And if you think I’m wrong, here’s the crowd last night, cheering to get a poster for the film:
That depressed me the most – I knew the movie would be bad, but I didn’t think I’d be in the minority in thinking so.
Read more of BC’s reviews at his Horrormovieaday blog.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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