Twilight takes place in a small Washington State town where everyone is either 1) super-friendly or 2) a vampire. The vampires are easy to spot because they hang out together in the parking lot of the local high school, looking super-pale and perching themselves on top of their jeep in a vaguely predatory manner. There are other, meaner vampires who steer clear of the high school, opting instead to skulk about at night, feasting on the usual assortment of lonely night watchmen and wobbly town drunks.
But Twilight is adapted from the unaccountably popular series of young-adult novels by Stephanie Meyer and isn’t a horror movie, so it isn’t much interested in the bad vampires’ activities — director Catherine Hardwicke cuts demurely away every time they start to feed. Instead, the film (sure to be one of this season’s big hits) pivots on what we all should recognize as a universal theme: what it is to be a teenage girl struggling with your parents’ separation, a forced relocation and the desire to hook up with the sexy, super-pale vampire in your biology class.
Said girl is played by Kristen Stewart (she of the embedded sneer and perpetually bitten bottom lip); her undead crush is played by newcomer Robert Pattinson (whose inert, set-to-smolder performance suggests a James Franco Saturday Night Live impression of “the guy from Twilight”). The sheer incompetence of the filmmaking (endless, giggle-inducing close-ups, chunky editing, blurry special effects) combined with the almost hallucinatory silliness of the material (didja know that vampires like to play baseball?) should make the film a camp classic, but it fails on even the the so-bad-it’s-good scale: Twilight is so bad, it’s terrible.