Twilight (2008)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
When Bella Swan moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, a mysterious classmate who reveals himself to be a 108-year-old vampire. Despite Edward's repeated cautions, Bella can't stay away from him, a fatal move that endangers her own life.
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27 films that influenced Twilight
What critics say influenced Twilight
It's like making a Star Wars movie with no space battles, or a Jaws movie without any shark attacks.
It is, as a result, impossible to label the film as anything more than a shameless cash-grab designed to artificially prolong the life of this profitable series, although, as far as shameless cash-grabs go, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is far easier to stomach than certain other franchise-extending installments (eg the Star Wars prequels).
At times, the dialogue is laugh-aloud bad - almost to the point of being hilarious - and some of the acting is reminiscent of what we saw taking center stage in George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy.
If nothing else, this leading man makes a change from the Judd Apatow brand of romantic hero - the woman-shy slacker who eschews the dating game to stay at home with his collection of Star Wars memorabilia.
Commentators have thus labelled it a Buffy The Vampire Slayer companion piece, and there is room for that argument, but Twilight is more self-serious and less ironic in its execution than the Joss Whedon-penned film/TV series and the subsequent and iconic long-running television programme.
Too bad - high school can be as scary a place as any vampire's lair, a fact that the television version (not the film) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer proved time and again, using monsters as metaphors to portray the very real horrors of growing up.
Similarly, "Twilight" isn't about sex in the way we, as adults, usually think of it: It's more about the things you want before you know you want them, which is what makes it different from another recent vampire-themed phenomenon, Joss Whedon's beloved series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Combining both elements of gothic horror with high school drama, the film comes off like the next “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but without the slayer and more soap opera elements than an actual body count.
MORE influenced by Anne Rice than by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephanie Meyer's young-adult novel Twilight and its sequels tell tales of grand, dark passion in a high school setting, equating blood-drinking with illicit sex without a trace of Buffy's knowing irony.
The movie is basically Rebel Without a Cause with fangs – except no one in it is nearly as talented as James Dean or Natalie Wood.
Twilight has become a cultural phenomenon akin to the Harry Potter series and with the film’s release, the High School Musical movies.
Her school is even better than the High School Musical school because even though in both schools it’s like a total fantasy that everybody is so nice to each other and everyone is everyone’s best friend, here it’s a serious grownup story and not just a bunch of nice kids singing and dancing, which is okay for little kids but not for more mature kids.
"Twilight" has a few gory plot turns - mostly offscreen - and one near-sex scene that may offend a few Amish people, but the rest is maybe 33 percent less wholesome than "High School Musical."
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(I kept being reminded of Jeffrey Combs’ line to the libidinous David Gale in Re-Animator: “You steal the secret of life and death and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed.”)
And if that line echoes a famous one from The Wizard of Oz, well, so be it, because in Twilight - the surefire hit adaptation of the first book from Stephenie Meyer's mega-selling saga - Bella Swann, like Dorothy Gale, is in for the ride of her life.
When the movie tries to show off their superhuman powers, it often turns downright goofy: when Edward sped off, carrying Bella piggyback, I was surreally reminded of a scene in Rob Schneider's The Animal.
What’s more, with a judicious application of hair gel, he strikes an eerie resemblance to Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone .
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Bella's town sheriff dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), is a pleasant cross between Harry Dean Stanton in "Pretty in Pink" and Andy Griffith.
Unwholesome, sure, but arguably no more so than Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre , two better-written Gothic romances about young women in thrall to a remote, charismatic, often cruel hero.