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Blah!

Kim Hollis: Vampires Suck, a film whose title we at BOP strongly support, finished in second place with $12.2 million for the weekend and $18.6 million since its Wednesday opening. A lot of the recent spoof films have been DOA. Do you think this reinvigorates the format or do you see it as more of a blah result?

Josh Spiegel: I think the charitable way to say it is that this movie could have - and should have, BOP-approved title or not - done a lot worse. Making nearly its entire budget back in five days is nothing to sniff at, even if the budget was low. I'd managed to avoid any ads for this movie, hearing about its existence only from a couple of websites and the unsurprisingly negative reviews. I don't think it reinvigorates the format; the only kind of movie to do that would do well and actually be, you know, funny.

Bruce Hall: Blah. This movie had the benefit of some very soft competition this weekend, not to mention (and let's factor this in a distant second) the inevitable Twilight backlash. The snake oil salesmen turned film maker duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer no doubt will have another modest success on their hands, which means they will continue to be allowed to make movies. If it’s any consolation to anyone, they ARE better than Uwe Boll - if only just a little. We can mock these films critically all we want but the sad fact is that what we have here is the cinematic equivalent of the dollar-a-scoop Chinese restaurant. You put forth minimal effort, carefully tailor your product for a narrow demographic (high strung businessmen with little time to care what they eat, or in this case bored teenagers still coming to grips with being freshmen), and if you make just enough money to keep the doors open you can consider yourself a success.





Meanwhile, there remains a curious lack of stray animals in the neighborhood. You get what you pay for. Now let us never speak of this again.

Matthew Huntley: We're all hoping for blah, because we definitely don't want to see this format reinvigorated, and by "this format," I mean the Friedberg-Seltzer one. It'd be great if the spoof format itself could see a resurgence and make its way back up to the standard of Airplane!/Naked Gun, but I'm not sure that kind of creativity exists in Hollywood any more.

Unfortunately, successful movies (i.e. Twilight) have a price and this is the worst kind. And the title just adds insult to injury, because Friedberg/Seltzer have practically supplied critics the ammo to rip apart their movie (how many reviews do you think featured the line, "Vampires Suck sucks" or "Vampires Suck: they sure do")? Since these guys have already laughed their way to the bank, I agree with Bruce: let's just slay the Vampires talk (wah wah) and move on. Otherwise, the terrible filmmakers win.

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