The fine art of parody is dead, and Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are it’s killers. Like some horrible bizarro world version of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, these two men have forged a fruitful filmmaking partnership that churns out movie after movie year after year, only whereas Powell and Pressburger were masters of cinema who produced nothing but silver screen classics, Friedberg and Seltzer are hacks who produce nothing but pain and suffering. From Scary Movie 2 and Date Movie to Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer have been terrorizing moviegoing audiences with their joyless brand of erratic sketch “comedy” for the last decade without remorse or pity. One imagines that if the killers in the Saw franchise ever turned their attentions to a film critic, they’d strap him down and make him watch one of these horrible films, the only way to escape being to scoop his own eyes out with a grapefruit spoon and shove sharpened pencils into his ears. Friedberg and Seltzer’s idea of comedy is, essentially, to watch the trailers for upcoming films and then write a so-called screenplay that does little more than reenact clips from those trailers with the insertion of a fart joke or a pop culture reference that will already be dated by the time their film hits theaters, which is astonishing, given that it takes these two all of three weeks to write, shoot, edit, and release most of their movies. Vampires Suck is likely the one and only exception to this rule, given that it’s target - the Twilight films - have been around for a couple of years and Friedberg and Seltzer may have actually had the chance to watch one or two of them before setting about spoofing them. And yet not only is Vampires Suck no better than their other efforts, it may actually be worse. I can’t think of any other comedy film that these two, or any other filmmaker, have ever produced that was so profoundly painful and depressing an experience.

I’ll give Friedberg and Seltzer this much credit: Twilight isn’t an easy target for spoofing. But that’s only because Twilight, in and of itself, is already so hysterical, so loopy, so ludicrous that it’s funny enough as it is. You don’t have to parody something that’s already comical. But these two, they sure try. And try. And try. They try way too hard. When you have to set up a joke by having characters exposit for minutes on end to explain the backstory of your target material, you are trying too hard to be funny. When you have your characters point out and explain sight gags, you are trying to hard to be funny. Good comedy is effortless. It just flows. For Friedberg and Seltzer, comedy is a herculean effort. They have to force the flow so hard you’d think they were running their jokes through a clogged drain. Maybe if they didn’t shove so many random, tangential pop culture references down there they wouldn’t have this problem. But don’t tell them that; dammit, we needed that Lady GaGa lookalike to show up for ten seconds and do literally nothing.

Vampires Suck follows a condensed version of the Twilight story: lonely, twitchy teenager Becca Crane moves to Sporks, Washington to live with her Sheriff father Frank and soon meets hunky Native American Jacob White and metrosexual enigma Edward Sullen, both of whom quickly fall in love with her and begin vying for her affections. Jacob turns out to be a werewolf and Edward turns out to be a vampire and none of that turns out to matter because at the end of the day theirs is the same cliche-ridden young love story that has been told ad nauseum, only this time it really sucks. For those wondering, the previous synopsis can be applied to both Vampires Suck and Twilight depending on how you modify the names. The only difference between the two is that Vampires Suck is a scatter-brained idiotic excuse for pop culture references whereas Twilight manages to stay focused on the plot at hand. Both are horrible but Twilight at least has to good fortune of being funny without feeling forced because sometimes the best comedy is unintentional.

Once it’s plot is established (actually, even before then, come to think of it) Vampires Suck is little more than a humorless, joyless, tedious cavalcade of pop culture references with no connection to the plot, which do not move the movie forward, and which do not inspire any reaction other than contempt and existential sorrow. Jersey Shore castmembers, Lady GaGa, Alice in Wonderland, Teams Edward and Jacob, the Kardashian sisters, The Weather Girls, The Black-Eyed Peas, True Blood and countless other random drek are caricatured, referenced, or simply shown one after the other in a procession so dour and sad it feels downright funereal. Things are meant to be funny because they simply exist in this movie. It doesn’t work that way. And when the script decides to throw an actual joke out there, it inevitably falls flat because the idiots producing this movie have never heard that brevity is the soul of wit. The jokes here are often times so long-winded in the set-up that by the time the punch line arrives you forget they were even telling a joke and just assume that the punch line is merely another line of dialogue.

It would be unfair to blame the cast for the failure of this film, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking they are any good. Jenn Proske, as Becca, is a lifeless lead who has little more than good looks going for her. She’s easier on the eyes than Twilight star Kristen Stewart is (and on those grounds alone would have been a better Bella Swan, what with the whole story being built around the character’s supposed beauty), but just as boring and twitchy an actress, which might be the sign of a brilliant spoof but feels like cinematic death on screen. Matt Lanter is almost identical to Robert Pattinson’s Edward and does a darn fine job of playing basically the same character, at least until the movie starts making a joke out of him, at which point Lanter’s performance turns into a stereotype of an effeminate man that is too stupid and offensive to be funny. Chris Riggi, as Jacob, gets away largely unscathed thanks only to his character’s marginalization.The whole turning into a chihuahua thing certainly won’t look good on a resume, though.

The Quick and Dirty: How bad is Vampires Suck? If only I had recorded the agonized groaning of the man seated behind me, you might understand. This fella was in serious pain and I assume he didn’t just leave because either he too is a bad movie survivalist who refuses to let the crap beat him, or he’s just someone who really really believes in getting every penny’s worth for the ticket he bought. When he ran from the theater as the credits rolled, he looked like he was going to head straight for the bathroom and puke. That, my friends, is Vampires Suck: nauseatingly bad.