A sorry excuse for cinema that marked the merciful end of a dire craze sinks its fangs into a streaming vein

Parodies and spoofs used to be genuinely funny – as well as a consistently successful stream of hit movies – until the infamous duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer arrived on the scene. The pair delivered several of the worst mainstream comedies you’re ever likely to see, but Vampires Suck mercifully kick-started the beginning of the end for a craze that had overstayed its welcome.

Between them, Friedberg and Seltzer used their background as writers on the smash hit Scary Movie to springboard into the director’s chair, and the results were incomparably dire on a critical level. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck were all deservedly savaged as black marks against the good name of cinema, but they all turned mind-boggling profits at the box office.

By comparison, their next “comedy” in the wake of the nauseating Twilight ripoff was The Starving Games, which took a colossal nosedive at the box office to earn less than $4 million from theaters. Prior to that, every single one of their prior efforts bar one had netted at least $80 million. They tried again with The Starving Games, Best Night Ever, and Superfast, but all three thankfully flopped.

However, Vampires Suck has become the latest from the vault to be dusted off and launched back into the streaming stratosphere, with FlixPatrol revealing it to be one of the most-watched features on Rakuten this weekend. There are plenty of better comedies out there, but not many that are actively worse, so you’ve got to wonder why subscribers have plumped for this one above all others.