Box Office - 'The Expendables' Beats Expendables

A pretty firm hold on last weekend's audience numbers helped The Expendables win at the box office for the second straight week. It still has a while to go before it's in the black, but the $80 million action flick has now made $65 million in ten days.

Usually with action films, particularly ones that aren't that great, a second weekend drop of 55 - 60% is in order. Expendables, aided by weak competition everywhere, only lost about 53%, so it was the clear winner this weekend with $16.5 million. Vampires Suck was fairly consistent for most of its five days in theaters, although its weekend draw was nothing to get excited about. It took expected hits on Thursday and Sunday, but it's going to be in the win column for Fox after another week or so, which means, and I'm speculating here, 3-D Movie can be made next year.

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Box Office - 'Expendables' Leads 'Vampires Suck'

We thought it would be crowded at the top of the box office charts this weekend, but I'm a tad surprised that it's The Expendables that looks like it might pull away from the pack and win for the second straight weekend. However, it is awfully close right now, so we won't make a strong case for that happening just yet.

But on Friday, Expendables drew about $5 million to lead the day, and when a returning champion does that, it usually means it's headed for the weekend title because it won't have first impressions to deal with. Odds are, the film will do about that well each day this weekend, even though it had slumped a bit during the week. Right behind it, however, is Vampires Suck with $4.4 million. This will do better than we thought, and might hit $20 million or slightly more by the end of the weekend (remember, it opened on Wednesday). Its weekend numbers figure to be in lower mid-teens, but that probably won't be enough to claim number one.

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Movie Review - 'Vampires Suck'

Vampires Suck Starring Jenn Proske, Matt Lanter, and Chris Riggi Directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer Rated PG-13

First, the good news: Vampires Suck is not as bad as 2008's astonishingly wretched spoof, Disaster Movie, from the worst directors with major studio support, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Now the bad news: Disaster Movie is one of the absolute worst films ever made. Without question, it's the bottom of the barrel among Friedberg-Seltzer productions, and that's quite an accomplishment. Seriously, thank yourself repeatedly for having the good sense to not see Disaster Movie. This does not mean Vampires Suck is a film you should rush out to see. On the contrary, none of these flicks - and Seltzer and Friedberg began directing the Fox spoofs, originally led by the halfway decent Scary Movie, with 2006's Date Movie - are worth your time. Nor were they apparently worth the time of their creators; each has been unbelievably lazy, trying not to find what's seen as important or somehow time-honored in the genre under the microscope and spoof that, but merely re-telling popular movies looking for disposable pop culture puns. Spoofs have a proud tradition, but two stand apart from the rest, Blazing Saddles and Airplane!. While dated (perhaps Airplane! more than Blazing Saddles because of its tips of the cap to pop culture), both movies still hold up because they're sharply written, full of not only great punchlines but also funny characters. Here's the difference: The characters in the great western spoof and the great disaster movie spoof are based on types and not specific characters from other films. They're recognizable, with a twist. In Vampires Suck, the character Edward Cullen from Twilight is reconditioned as Edward Sullen. Bella Swan is Becca Crane. Jacob Black is Jacob White. Terrific work, fellas. And the stories are exactly the same, only with, what for the sake of efficiency, we'll label as jokes. Jokes about how Bella is a joyless sap who twitches a lot, for example. And it's only funny, to the very small degree that it could be, to people who see Twilight to make fun of it. That's a small demographic.

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Fake In-Movie Character Posters from 'Scott Pilgrim'

I saw a little movie called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World the other night. We'll review that next week. But one of the characters - an evil ex- that Pilgrim (Michael Cera) has to defeat in order to date Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is movie star Lucas Lee, played by Chris Evans. Here are some fake movie posters from Lee's catalog:

The posters come to us from Empire, and there are a few snippets of Lucas Lee's movies in his chapter of Scott Pilgrim. Not enough, probably, to warrant a Machete-type spin-off.What you will see plenty of is exactly what the new Captain America has to offer in highly edited movie fight scenes in this movie in just a few days. Here are three more posters featuring Lucas Lee. I would pay to see The Game Is Over 2 just for the ridiculous premise behind the title.

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New Clip from 'Vampires Suck' Unsurprisingly Bad

Grudgingly, I will tip my cap to Vampires Suck for one slight bit of satire. The Twilight spoof - which in this clip also mentions the cast of Jersey Shore for reasons that make no sense - has the pale vampire guy as you would expect. And they call him Edward Sullen.

An easy joke to make, sure, but given how off-base the creators of Disaster Movie usually are, I'm surprised they honed in on an obvious but fitting joke. And that's the end of my praise; the movie still looks awful. Judge for yourself with this first clip, titled "Pale Guy," courtesy of MovieWeb.

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