Sinking some fun fangs into Bella and Edward

The makers of Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans have a new film out, and it's probably their best work to date.

That's most definitely a backhanded compliment, but the fact that Vampires Suck is a step above god-awful is something of a miracle. It's like watching the kid who always turns in nothing but a blank paper suddenly score a C-minus on his chemistry final. One has to wonder if he was looking at someone else's paper.

For those who have missed this recent string of Airplane-without-the-funny spoof movies, the formula is very simple: Writer-directors Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg take a movie genre that is popular with young people, cast inexpensive actors, and then insert a ton of slapstick, gross-out scenes and apropos-of-nothing jokes involving whatever celebrities are trending the highest on Twitter.

Vampires Suck has all of this and more, passing off as humor a baby getting hit with a bowling ball and threats of bodily harm against a man in a wheelchair. A compound fracture is used as a punch line, and then shown again and again, as if the sight of someone's spine sticking out of his neck can only get funnier. What's most disappointing isn't the obviousness of the humor, but how dated some of it is. The Segway scooter was a decent sight gag - the first 10,000 times it was used in film and television. Paul Blart: Mall Cop should have marked the official retirement.

Vampires Suck looks as if it cost less than the typical Bon Jovi video to make, mines gay stereotypes (werewolves in cutoff jeans singing "It's Raining Men"), and manages not a single memorable joke at the expense of the easiest target in the world: Stephenie Meyer fans.

And yet there are small signs of progress here. Maybe it's the Twilight movies source material, which has long since become self-parody, making it easier to lampoon. Vampires Suck is more focused than this team's other efforts, spending at least 65 percent of the screen time making fun of one movie. Several of the actors have decent comic timing, even when there's very little material to work with. (Diedrich Bader does the most with the least, playing the town sheriff, Frank.)

The high points? There's a semi-funny joke at the expense of the Black Eyed Peas. Dave Foley keeps his streak alive - he's appeared in every crappy movie of the 21st century for at least two minutes. And the running time is a merciful 80 minutes. That's the one reliably great thing about reviewing bad movies: Almost all of the biggest losers are less than an hour and a half long.

Directed by Aaron Seltzer and Jacob Friedberg. With Jenn Proske, Diedrich Bader, and Matt Lanter. Distributed by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (sexual content, violence, profanity)

Playing at: area theaters

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