Sparkly vampires & one awful leading lady = a film that's tough to watch

Rating: 4/10 (30 August 2011)

I'm about as far from this movie's demographic as you can get (I'm no 12-year-old girl), but in the interests of vampire cinema I forced myself to sit through this film in the hope of somehow enjoying it. Of course, I was bitterly resulted by what I saw, which is nothing more than an angsty teen romance that tries, and fails, to be a hip vampire movie. Vampire movies have long contained simmering sexuality – Chris Lee positively exuded it in his Hammer outings – but the theme is reduced to a superficial level in this film, as vampirism is just yet another problem – like acne and the in-crowd – that our young lovers have to deal with.
The movie's po-faced efforts to tell this story seriously (I mean, you want me to take sparkling vampires seriously?) make it all the worse. The overly familiar plot never once attempts to bring anything new to the table, and the late-stage introduction of a supposed villainous character is a real fail. The film's nadir has to be the baseball set-piece, in which a family of vampires use their supernatural skills to beat the opposing team. Cinema doesn't get much more embarrassingly bad than this.
Then again, if sullen teenage heroines with faces you want to slap (Kristen Stewart, I'm talking about you) are your thing, and your have a penchant for spiky-haired loners in white makeup, then by all means give it a go. You never know, you might even enjoy it. Unlike me.