Crimes:
• Parodying the Twilight franchise so closely, it’s all but impossible for anyone unfamiliar with the books or movies to follow what little story there is
• Defaulting over and over to jokes about farting, shitting, sharting, teabagging, ejaculating, and the female lead’s reportedly cavernous vagina
• Tossing in random references to Avatar, Angry Birds, Ace Of Cakes, and various eccentric Johnny Depp characters, without coming up with anything funny or on-topic to say about any of them (although the fake-Depp Mad Hatter does inevitably sit on someone’s face while saying, “Don’t you know you can’t have tea without the tea bag?”)
• Trying to skate by with only about 70 minutes of actual movie, padded out to a 80-minute running time thanks in part to mean-spirited footage of real-life Twilight fans, taken from YouTube and inserted before the closing credits (which themselves are padded out with outtakes and bloopers)
Defender: Writer-director Craig Moss, and stars Eric Callero (who plays Edward), Heather Ann Davis (Bella), Frank Pacheco (Jacob), and Peter Gilroy (Jasper)
Tone of commentary: Annoyingly laugh-y. Moss, who previously made the excruciating Judd Apatow parody The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall And Felt Superbad About It mostly allows his cast to run the commentary, sitting back while they blow raspberries at him and make fun of his direction. (“Those are good close-ups, Craig.” “Nice shot of ketchup and mustard.”) Pacheco seems to be having the most fun, as he points out all the different foods he got to eat from scene to scene, and as he hastens to say, “Ladies, that is not the face I make,” in regard to the many moments when he simulates orgasm.
What went wrong: The way the actors and their director laugh their heads off at every raunchy joke during their commentary explains a lot about how this movie came to be. After a scene where a character enthuses that she “just took the biggest dump upstairs,” Moss proudly says, “That was my third favorite line in the movie.” When his cast admires the dirty drawings in one shot, Moss notes that it was the work of his prop guy, who’s “an amazing artist.” The guys also add their own bits of sophomoric humor whenever they can, such as when they refer to California’s Mount Pinos as “Penis.”
Yet there are lines even the cast dares not cross. They’re all taken back a bit by the film’s most disgusting line of dialogue, when Flip Schultz (playing Davis’ dad) describes in detail the semen-swallowing sex position he calls a “Skytram.”
Pacheco: “Craig Moss—writer and director, everybody—wrote those lines.”
Gilroy: “Where were you in your life when you were writing those lines? In front of a fireplace? With coffee and cigarettes? In Paris?”
Pacheco: “You didn’t wake up in an opium den in Singapore and come up with that line, did you, Craig?”
Comments on the cast: Everyone’s impressed with Danny Trejo’s one scene—so much that Davis can only muster a muted “Wow” when the scene ends with Trejo’s character waddling offscreen with a pantload of diarrhea. Davis also sympathizes with one of the extras, who was so pretty that “the boys would not stop hounding her.” And Davis apparently knows whereof she speaks. Throughout the track, her male co-stars razz her about how the crew loved seeing her in her corset for one sexy sequence, and they note which of them got to touch her breasts during the shoot. At one point, they even propose a drinking game, telling viewers to take a shot “every time Heather makes a poo joke or someone grabs her tit.”
Inevitable dash of pretension: This isn’t really a pretentious crowd. Outside of noting where he tried to replicate shots from the Twilight movies, Moss limits the commentary’s cinematic references to jokey mentions of David Lean and The Artist. The cast also refers to Moss’ cameo in the film not as his “Hitchcock” but his “Shyamalan,” which leads them to start singing “Shyamalan” to the tune of “Mahna-Mahna.”
Commentary in a nutshell: After a climactic scene in which Davis eats a hunk of cake, then farts, the gang all laughs, Davis shrieks, “This is so awesome!” and Callero faux-solemnly says, “The thesis of the film.”