Vampires Suck is a 2010 parody film written and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, released by 20th Century Fox and running a brisk 80 minutes. Jenn Proske plays Becca Crane, Matt Lanter plays Edward Sullen and Chris Riggi plays Jacob White, in a send-up of the Twilight saga. It holds a 4 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from around 90 reviews and a Metascore of 18.

There was an era of spoof movies that really took charge in the late 2000s. Epic Movie. Disaster Movie. And this one, which I have finally got around to watching sixteen years after everybody else did. Insert panic face about my own age here.

And the thing I genuinely did not know until I looked into it is that this entire era is essentially two men. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer wrote and directed Date Movie in 2006, Epic Movie in 2007, Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie in 2008, and then this. That is not a genre having a moment. That is a two-man operation working at pace.

And here is the part that properly reframed the whole thing for me. Before any of that, Friedberg and Seltzer co-wrote the original Scary Movie in 2000. Which means the gold standard I keep measuring everything against was written by the exact same pair responsible for the film I am reviewing today. They arrived at the summit on their first attempt and then spent the following decade descending from it in public. Several reviewers have made that same observation, noting that Scary Movie worked because the writing was both genuinely raunchy and genuinely smart about its targets, and that nothing they made afterwards matched it.

On the film itself, they really did do well with a lot of how they exaggerated the character traits. The lunchroom scenes work. The classroom scene works. Whenever the film locks onto something specific and recognisable from Twilight and simply pushes it one notch further, it lands. The trouble, and this is the recurring criticism of all their work, is that it cannot sustain that. It keeps veering off into unrelated pop culture references that have nothing to do with vampires, teen romance or anything else the film is supposedly parodying.

But if you do not take yourself too seriously, you will find this funny. In the most dumb way imaginable, and perhaps I judge myself slightly for that, but I laughed.

I also went in assuming this must have been the last of that era of over the top spoof films, and I was close. Friedberg and Seltzer did keep going afterwards with The Starving Games, Best Night Ever and Superfast. However, Vampires Suck was the last of their films to be distributed by a major studio and the last to receive a wide theatrical release. So in every sense that actually matters, this is where that era ends.