Forget the hand-holding tweens in the audience – Twilight itself could use a chaperone. Based on Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire, Twilight is a heaving, heavy-breathing romance, a hilariously campy movie metaphor for the agony of abstinence. You’d have to go back to 1961’s Splendor in the Grass, with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood as high-school lovebirds caught between their urges and their parents’ disapproval of an early marriage, to find another teen movie as sexually frustrated. From the moment the undead Edward (Robert Pattinson) gazes upon Bella (Kristen Stewart) in biology class, his pale face crumples into an expression of pent-up pain. Soon after, he’s swooping up behind her in the cafeteria. “If you were smart, you’d stay away from me,” he whispers, even as he sniffs her hair and shudders. With that combination of devotion and danger, it’s no wonder tween girls swoon. Twilight is a shoddy B movie – full of choppy editing, embarrassing special effects and unsteady performances. Yet it’s ultimately doomed by the decision of director Catherine Hardwicke to turn what could have been a sexual undercurrent into a tropical storm.
