You may well have been waiting for the review on this one with baited breath.

Yes, that’s right…today, just for you, my dear readers, I have descended into the valley of the shadow of suck and I have emerged on the other side, stronger for my trials but at the same time weak and weary from the road.  It took me just two hours to walk down that misery trail…but it felt like five.  Maybe even five and a half.

That’s right, I watched Twilight, and it was indeed as bad a movie as I had feared it would be.

The plot is fairly simple, and not too bad in and of itself–in Twilight’s world, vampires exist, but they’ve been heavily modified for the clear consumption of twelve year old girls.  Their condition is spread via the transmission of venom, they move with alarming speed that ALMOST but not quite looks like teleporting, they have superhuman strength, and they drink blood.  Any blood will do, surprisingly, but human is best.  Oh, and forget about the whole “sunlight and crosses” thing–sunlight just makes them sparkly (no, I’m NOT kidding) and crosses don’t seem to have any effect at all.  I seem to recall them walking past a couple without incident.  The only way you can actually KILL one of these things is to, according to the film itself “tear (them) apart and burn the pieces”.  So of course, a transplant teenager from a recently broken home named Bella is going to move within a few miles of one of these sparkly vampires, and naturally, they fall in love.

If you too can taste bile at this point rest assured you are not alone.  Twilight is easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through.  This isn’t hyperbole, either.  This is sheer truth.  This movie HURT to watch it.  It caused me physical pain, mostly in my stomach but a bit in my head.

First, the acting is a solid lump of huge embarrassing failure.  Kristen Stewart should not be allowed within thirty feet of a camera ever again and Robert Pattinson’s every word makes me cringe.  It doesn’t help that they’re given some of the most overblown lines on the face of the earth, either–if Edward Cullen whined one more time about what a monster he is I was going to shoot him myself just to put him out of MY misery.  Let alone his–this guy is one of the biggest emo jerks I’ve ever seen.  What made the whole thing even harder to swallow was how it whipsawed so frantically between different KINDS of suck.  First it’s overblown, then it’s angsty.  Then it’s just boring and they spend twenty minutes talking about stuff.  It takes fully twenty minutes for the first interesting thing to happen in the movie, and frankly, it’s not that interesting.  Then they’ll spend roughly ten minutes TALKING about the interesting thing that happened!  And just when I think that’s over, suddenly my pretention meter starts pegging because Bella’s talking to her friends about what “strong, independent women” they are.

Perhaps the worst thing about Twilight is the fact that it is only the first in as many as six movies.  The misery has only just begun, folks…it’s only just begun.

And I’m not looking forward to anything else that comes out of this franchise.  This is as godawful as movies get, and I’m not eager to see how they tear open the floorboards and start digging now that they’ve found the bottom of the barrel.