Full disclosure: I am not a Twilight fan. So I came into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 without knowing too much about the plot and with a lot of preconceptions about Twilight. From the first shot of the movie when Jacob (Taylor Lautner) took his shirt off to reveal his well-defined abs, I realized everything I knew and thought about Twilight was absolutely correct.

For those of you unfamiliar with Breaking Dawn, the premise of the story is that Bella (Kristen Stewart), is a human who is madly in love with a vampire named Edward (Robert Pattinson). Just as they are about to be married, Bella gets pregnant with a monster child, which has disastrous consequences.

That was the entire movie. Nothing happened. Honestly, that was one my lesser concerns about Breaking Dawn. From confusing storytelling (what the heck is imprinting?), to wooden performances from the entire cast, to some of the worst special effects I’ve seen in a movie in years, Breaking Dawn was an utter mess.

The movie cost about $110 million to make, but you would have though that a bunch of cash-strapped film school students made the special effects in this movie. Bella’s pregnancy (which has reportedly caused seizures to some viewers) was a bloody mess, but easily the worst special effects in the film came in a scene when a tribe of werewolves met up to have an argument.

The werewolves in that scene looked completely ridiculous, bearing more of a resemblance to wax museum castoffs than to their real life counterparts. But the part that really took the cake was when the film makers tried to portray telepathic communication between the werewolves. Terribly acted voice-overs that boomed like they were read into a microphone helped make this scene flat out terrible. Even if the rest of the movie was as good as Casablanca, which it obviously wasn’t, this scene alone would have made it impossible to recommend. It was that bad.

I think Breaking Dawn was, however, the funniest movie I’ve seen all year. While there were a few jokes in the film that were genuinely funny, the majority of the laughs came directly from the poor quality of the film itself. The actors were so serious in their roles that almost every scene became unintentionally hilarious.

I saw the movie right when it came out, and early on it was obvious that the crowd of fanboys and fangirls was hopeful for a good movie. But pretty soon, most of the audience, like myself, was laughing at the film, not with it.

There weren’t many redeeming aspects. Stewart was the only person who struck me as an okay actor. Besides her, Pattinson and Lautner were, like most of this melodramatic film, over-the-top.

Breaking Dawn was one of the most fun movie-going experiences I’ve had this past year. Unfortunately for Twilight fans, it was for all of the wrong reasons. Why anyone would see this as a quality story, I have no idea.

Dan’s Terrible Movie of the Month

[su_youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHa-ygkF_M”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHa-ygkF_M [/su_youtube]

Dan Krane can be contacted at [email protected]