Seeing Kristen Stewart in last week’s Adventureland reminded me I still hadn’t gotten around to checking out Twilight, the teen vampire novel-turned-movie phenomenon that’s been out on DVD for a couple of weeks. Now, before I get started on this, let me just say that I have nothing against vampires and nothing against teenagers and nothing against when the two get together and swoon over each other. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, is still one of my all-time favourite TV shows, for its wit, deep characterization and smart exploitation of the blood-sucker mythos, and it was at its best when it dwelled on the forbidden romance between Buffy and tormented good-guy vamp Angel.

Twilight, like HBO’s True Blood, also centres around the romance between a human girl (Stewart) and a hunky, brooding vamp dude (Robert Pattinson) with whom she can’t actually get it on. It’s all about abstinence, basically, as the two would-be lovers writhe around with suppressed desire for each other but never actually do the deed. Romantic, sure, but not very interesting, especially compared to Buffy’s brilliant handling of the subject, where the two actually did get it on, only to activate a curse that turned Angel evil—I like the “bad boyfriend” storyline better than the “horny immortal” one.

I’ll give director Catherine Hardwicke props for giving the film a bit more realistic-looking grittiness than I expected, but maybe I just need to be an angsty teenage girl to really get down with Twilight, which came off to me as just a lot of melancholy moralizing. Also, I can’t really get with the revamped vamps, who are immune to sunlight and garlic. I mean come on, mess around with the clichés a bit, but the least you could do is do something fun with them, rather than chuck ’em out completely.

The opposite of Twilight’s dramatics has got to be Out of England, U.K. comedian and original Office co-creator and star Ricky Gervais’s HBO stand-up special, an hour of true hilarity now out on DVD.