I know I've seen a few movies in recent memory that I didn't absolutely despise -- Private Parts was, um, interesting; I rather liked G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra despite its numerous shortcomings; and I enjoyed Iron Man (though I still don't think it approaches Spider-Man 2 greatness) -- but it seems like most of the movies I've watched as of late have outright sucked.

"Sucked" is italicized above, of course, because most of the movies I've seen recently have been vampire movies. I'm not even including Twilight among these -- yeah, that wasn't great, but I can't really call it bad. It was just derivative emo teenybopper fare that seemed cribbed from early "Buffy" season developments (not to mention the entirety of "Roswell"), with the only original contribution being the vampires' glittering in sunlight instead of burning. And that was stupid.

So there was Rise: Blood Hunter, which is pretty close to being the worst vampire movie I've ever seen. The following vampire movies at least had some decent visuals, but Rise looked every bit like the cinematic excrement it was. Picture Lucy Liu becoming a vampire and then proceeding to kill the four vampires responsible for spawning her in a narrative so thin it makes the "story" of Mario Bros. -- the original one -- seem epic by comparison. About the only good thing in the movie was when she killed Topher from "Dollhouse", and even that was lame because it showed that the "heroine"'s moral compass was shot to shit.

I'm not even going to talk about the first two of the Underworld films at length -- suffice it to say that I'm glad Target's $3.98 sale the week I bought them didn't include the third, because then I would've had to suffer through another entry in that abominable series. They're vampires; they shouldn't be fighting primarily with guns! And that whole racism/slavery backstory explaining the enmity between vampires and werewolves was rubbish.

And several days ago I watched 30 Days of Night, which was also flipping terrible despite its promising premise. I mean, you have an isolated town plunged into darkness for 30 days -- great setting for a vampire movie, right? Except the filmmakers ruined it by having the vamps ransack the town and murder almost everyone immediately following the initial sunset, which kinda rendered the whole thing pointless. If you're going to clean out the pantry in three hours, why bother squatting in a place for 30 days? That was hardly the only thing wrong with that movie, though -- among other things, there was also the vampires' apparent preoccupation with wearing blood instead of drinking it. And the conclusion was just laughable.

But I think the film I hate most of all was the one that I watched last night -- Domino -- which wasn't a vampire movie at all. I absolutely despise films that are shot like music videos, and this one not only had extended party and shooting sequences set to rap, but also abused the hell out of the thing where a voiceover will introduce a character, followed by a pause in the action as they throw up a label/caption for the character for no apparent reason. That's fine for crime movie trailers or even introductory sequences at the beginning of a movie, but I damn sure don't want to see it throughout a two-plus-hour film. There were also tons of stupid scenes that had no point whatsoever, like when that fat comedienne went on Jerry Springer (because, at 28, she was the youngest mixed-race grandmother in the world) and broke out that ridiculous mixed-race flow chart. I thought the movie was supposed to be about bounty hunting? And then there was the whole "based on a true story" aspect of the thing, which was just lame because there is no fucking way the bulk of this movie happened in real life. The Domino backstory might have been more/less accurate, but I don't see why they felt the need to plunge the character into the ridiculous and convoluted plot that comprised the remainder of the film. I feel like putting a bounty on Tony Scott and Richard Kelly for this mess.

Incidentally, Richard Kelly wrote and directed Southland Tales -- a movie so bad I can't legitimately include it on this list of hateful movies I've seen because, when I popped it in about a month ago, I ended up stopping 50 or so minutes into the film and putting on some "Power Rangers: RPM" episodes instead. I have no intention whatsoever to finish watching that awful mess. Ever.