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Movie:		2.0
Picture:		4.0
Sound:		5.0
Extras:		1.0
Score:		2.0

Director(s):	Stephen Cafiero • Vincent Lobelle
Writer(s):	Jean-Patrick Benes, Stephen Cafiero
Starring:	Frederique Bel • Julie Fournier • Patrick Mille • Sam Karmann • Vincent Desagnat
Genre:	Comedy • Horror
Website:	http://www.lesdentsdelanuit.fr/
Release Date:	November 17, 2009

List Price:	DVD - $22.99
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I hate to sound like an old fogy, but boy, they sure don’t make ‘em like they used to. And by ‘em, I mean spoof movies in the Zucker mold (specifically Airplane and The Naked Gun) that were amusing enough at the time, but in retrospect have come to seem like small miracles in comparison with the films that they have inspired. Vampire Party is just one of those films, and it does absolutely nothing to better the image of the parody film as lazy, uninspired, and more irritating than funny. But unlike Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and Superhero Movie, this is from France.

Sam (Patrick Mille), Alice (Frederique Bel), and Prune (Julie Fournier) are young people who (as is clearly established in the opening narration, perhaps the only very French touch in the whole movie) love to party. This is just about the only distinguishing characteristic that any of them are given, but it is enough. to motivate them to sneak their way into an ultra secret party held in a castle that is only accessible by helicopter. Once there, they run into broad stereotypes: loser Edouard (Vincent Desagnat), old dentist Serge (Sam Karman), and Jessica (Helene de Fougerolles), and proceed to go through one of the most generically shot, uninvolved party sequences in feature film history. But things only get more predictable once it is revealed that this party is in fact a ruse to gather people together outside of civilization so that they can be feasted upon by vampires-a vampire party, if you will. Will they escape? Will they be devoured by people wearing the costumes and makeup left over from Underworld? Will there be an ongoing gag in which the main characters turn into different things because they read the wrong spells from this spell book that the vampires have, because vampires totally do spells? I’d answer these questions for you, because I know the answers, but that’s probably not even necessary.

If it sounds like I’m being mean to this movie, I’m sorry, because that really is a bad quality in a critic. The fact is, it’s the only futile defense that we have against movies that are just really, aggressively bad. Just how thoughtlessly misjudged is Vampire Party? The film contains one direct movie parody, and that is of the scene in Titanic where Jack and Rose stand at the front of the boat and have that romantic, Oscar-clip ready moment where they make out. It was annoying once (that movie’s over a decade old, and it’s been parodied roughly eight hundred million times since that movie’s release); it’s even worse four times, with little to no variation each time it cuts away to the same damn thing. Add in the fact that parody material promptly ends whenever the vampires come into the thing (making the movie feel really schizophrenic), or that the ridiculous tropes of recent vampire phenomenons (would you not love to see a well-made Twilight parody?) go largely untouched, and you have a movie that feels hopelessly out of touch with a culture at large.

Looking back, one of the things that made older parody films work so well was that all of their characters were clearly defined as adults (as opposed to twenty something’s here who might act like high schoolers); it made their self-seriousness that much funnier, and the material that much more credible, because it made it more clearly resemble the films that they used as reference points. Moreover, they got the right actors to do it. As funny as Leslie Nielsen is (and that much funnier when you see him early in his career; it’s very similar to the road that Alec Baldwin has taken), equal credit must be given to supporting performers like Ricardo Montalban and Robert Goulet, who played villains with roughly the same kind of panache that they might in a film where they play opposite dynamic action stars. Here, no performer really stands out because there is no solid center to perform against; when everyone is simply acting as ridiculous as they can, there’s nothing for a viewer to latch onto for an entire movie. The result is something that isn’t just unfunny, but downright oppressive.

DVD Bonus Features

None.