Review: 'Twilight' is sparkly fantasy and not scary

Twilight   PG 13        

            This movie finally gets a review after years of suggested views and people saying how bad it is if you're over 13 and a boy. I am clearly not the demographic, not one of the legions of tween girls who have sat through this morose picture thinking it was the greatest masterpiece since Hannah Montana the Movie. And I also like vampire movies and horror movies sometimes but this is neither a scary movie or even remotely more chilling than sitting through any one of the Olson Twins DVDs. (Some would say the vacation in Italy was scary).

Our adventure begins in Arizona where Bella, a morose poser who probably goes to Hot Topic and thinks it makes her instantly cool, is forced out of her loveless Mom's house to go live in dreary Washington with her even more distant cop father. Sounds like a charmer, with kind of an Arachnophobia feel, with a little Frailty thrown in.

Catherine Hardewick has probably never done anything like it before, an actual horror movie, so it comes off as a made for TV special on teen angst. The problem doesn't seem to be direction though, so much as story, as the script was clearly cut and pasted liberally from the first novel of a ridiculously popular teen book series that came out of nowhere in the mid 2000s. But it's not Harry Potter. (The books are better but not by much).

The dialog between Bella and her classmates comes off as the kind of stuff teen children never, ever say to each other. In the guise of smart commentary, it seems like they're all postage stamps of what teens could act like if they lived in this town, were they in a movie winking at each other. (The one thing I can identify with is the isolated little high school bit).

If Ed Wood had directed this movie, it would have been a classic of the highest camp. The funny thing is though it takes itself so deadly serious when the obvious pale skinned vampire dude who's the bad boy shows up. Ed Cullen might as well have a shirt on that says 'I Suck...a lot'. This guy also doesn't look 17. Okay so he's the undead but still, he is ripped! Does he work out every so often using the home gym? Anyway. He is also a creepy stalker who spends most of the movie tracking Bella and claiming he is both disgusted and turned on by her smell.

Not kidding. She smells good to vampires. They can't get enough of her. In fact, she smells good to her peers, even though she does nothing to warrant this admiration, at all. She comes onto the campus like a flaky poser goth (because she is not a real goth) and is so bland that she comes of as already undead. Might as well join up with the vampires.

And for some reason the town is perfectly okay with the Cullen clan because they have a truce with the cheesy werewolf clan, who are local Indians apparently. Now what is likely saved for sequels is some kind of showdown between vampires and lycans...like in the cheesy but entertaining Underworld. We don't get that here. No, the only tension in Twilight is shot from a distance, and then the Cullen boy discovers there is another vamp clan in town that also tracks here, for the big finale.

At one point Ed and Bella climb up into the trees, where they psent most of their CGI work, and then they play thunder assisted baseball, and there's a fight in a hall of mirrors. What still doesn't make sense though, because the dialogue (even if the scenery is pretty) is what anyone sees in Bella, besides her being an obvious recreation of the book author done as a movie character, (a Mary Sue literally).Were she in a poser clique at my old high school she would still be remembered as the odd girl out, not the charmer who smelled good.

Sparkling in sunlight. Really. Maybe it is scarier if you think how much money this thing made, or why it did so, as if everyone tween aged was turned into a cult like following of zombies after watching it. The very idea might be a decent horror movie script, but not this one.    
Review by Adam Browe