So here we are, on the eve of the release of the exciting new film that will redefine cinema for the next generation: THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON. I'd say that this is an intentional insult to the Norse sagas, because Vikings might have been the biggest badasses on the entire planet ever throughout the course of history, but I don't think that Stephanie Meyer (acclaimed author of: Twilight) even knows what a saga actually is. Plus, since the book (and movie, I guess) involves werewolves it's also grossly inappropriate. Nobody associates a new moon with werewolves, unless maybe the werewolf is blind and can't tell the difference. In fact I propose that the movie immediately be retitled to Twilight II: Your Indian is a Werewolf. Hollywood, call me up and we'll talk about this.

So, you might be in the unenviable situation of having a girlfriend who is so in love with Twilight and its extremely arousing vampires that she asked you if you are on "Team Jacob" (Werewolf Sex) or "Team Edward" (Vampire Sex). If you're smart, you probably broke up with her as soon as those words - and possibly your dick - left her mouth. If you're still in it for the sex (Human Sex), you probably just chose one of the two and maybe she got mad at you. I'm here to help dispel the confusion that question caused by bringing you, humble reader, up to speed on what Twilight is. Just in case you've been lucky enough to escape hearing anything about it, I apologize in advance. You're about to enter a world where you wish all literature could be destroyed, even those totally sweet Norse sagas.

Who the hell is responsible for this plague? The most immediate answer is acclaimed author of Twilight Stephenie Meyer, who actually wrote the books, but I'm going to blame Anne Rice because she decided it would be a great idea to make vampires sexy and turn this into about a billion dollars of book sales, at which point she went crazy and wrote Bible fanfiction that she had to defend on her own Amazon review page.

Stephenie Meyer was probably crazy from the beginning. The short summary is that she's a Mormon housewife who had a sex dream about a vampire and decided to turn it into a series of terrible books which read kind of like your average romance between Cloud and Sephiroth. She claims to have never read another book about vampires - or judging from how she writes, any other book ever - and doesn't watch R-rated movies. I'm pretty sure that she's also only capable of writing Twilight, because at some point she wrote a bad science fiction novel that she described as "for people who don't like science fiction" - that is, anyone without glasses and a bad haircut, who is allergic to the idea of wearing a shirt with a wolf howling at the moon on it - that sounded exactly like Twilight, but with aliens and some messed-up body snatcher stuff where the alien possessing a girl is also in love with her. Meyer's next project, which was abandoned because the internet dared to laugh at it, was a rewrite of Twilight from the perspective of Edward Cullen, Teenage Vampire as opposed to Bella Swan, Author Surrogate. You can tell that the woman is just brimming with ideas.

Our saga begins when homely clumsy teenage girl Bella Swan leaves beautiful Phoenix, Arizona for the hideous and gloomy Pacific Northwest. This is immediately where the story loses me, because I grew up in Arizona and I think that describing it (and especially the area around Phoenix) as one of the worst places on in the US is kind of charitable. We're talking about the state that has ASU here. The birthplace of rodeo. The Cardinals. Where Pluto, which is like the bitch of every other planet, was discovered. You get the idea. Compare and contrast to the pacific northwest, which gave us Nirvana, donuts that have bacon on them, crazy people, and Steve Ballmer's sweaty armpits.

Immediately upon arriving in the beautiful town of Forks, Washington, our humble and homely narrator is immediately drooled over by all of the local plebes except a group of mysterious pale dudes and ladies who all sit together at lunch. This means they either play Dungeons and Dragons or are the coolest kids ever. Nobody can seem to decide, especially Bella's teenage entourage of the Actual Popular Kids, which has the right kind of ethnic diversity to be able to form Captain Planet. I don't know about you, but I grew up near towns that had one stoplight in them and I can guarantee you that they don't exactly have the right demographics to be able to give somebody the Ring of Heart. Maybe things are different in the wacky world of Forks, Washington, where anything can happen! (As long as 'anything' involves vampires.)

I completely lost my train of thought for a moment. Returning to the story of The Twilight Saga: Twilight, Edward Cullen, Teen Vampire decides that even though he has never talked to another human being before - ever? - he absolutely needs to talk to Bella Swan because she is "like heroin" to him. I can only assume this is some kind of reference to him sitting next to her in class while she was on the rag, and then getting so turned on that later he had to sneak into the girl's bathroom to suck on one of her tampons. At this point I also feel obligated to point out now that this book is about "the eroticism of abstinence" which I can only assume means "instead of sex teenagers should just finger their girlfriends in the bathroom of a Starbucks and brag about it on the internet later."

At long last, something actually happens. There is an incident in which a student driving a minivan almost crashes into Bella Swan, Dumb Teen Girl, in which Teen Vampire saves her by using his super-vampire super-strength and super-speed. Despite this she still doesn't realize that he's a vampire, possibly because these days teenage girls are bred to be idiots. See: popularity of Twilight. Adding further insult to injury, this just leads me down deeper into despair and disbelief because in the only world in which a teenager would ever willingly drive a minivan, Superman is evil and Batman enjoys killing. And - I swear that I am not making this up - Bella Swan is later saved by Edward Cullen, Teen Vampire, from gang rape in a not entirely dissimilar fashion. At this point you might begin to wonder what, exactly, is wrong with Stephenie Meyer, as if you hadn't been clued in before. This represents the climax, if you will, of the first act of the book.

How, you ask, could this possibly get dumber? We're about to find out.

First of all, dreamy Teen Vampire breaks into Bella Swan's room late at night, coming in through the window much like a spooky bat would and removing my favorite part of the vampire myth (protip: vampires have to be invited in) except that by now I am now certain that 'vampire' is only the loosest possible term that could be used to describe what I'm talking about, in order to watch Author Surrogate And Homely Teen Girl Bella Swan sleep. Now, when Teen Girl Bella Swan finds out about this, she considers it romantic instead of completely insane and creepy, and doesn't tell her dad (who is a cop - ps: completely irrelevant) about it. All I can say is that if some crazy asshole was breaking into my daughter's room to stare at her while she sleeps I'd probably sneak up there in the middle of the night and blow his ass away (especially if I was a cop).

I have to stop for a moment here and tell you about Arizona public schools. In Arizona, instead of learning the alphabet or how to add, you get taught local crazy indian myths in grade school. This is why I write about Twilight for Heavy.com instead of being a superman of industry like John Galt. This is only relevant because at one point, the local noble savages in the form of Team Jacob, Future Werewolf, explains the local myth of vampires to Bella Swan and she is both completely surprised and enraptured by the tale instead of being bored and countering with the time that she totally saw a skinwalker. My suspension of disbelief has kind of taken a vacation to the Bermudas at this point and I kind of wish that I could join it, maybe have a mojito or something. Instead I'm stuck indoors with a can of Hamms. By the way, she still hasn't figured out that super-strong super-hottie who is never in the sunlight, Edward Cullen, is a vampire. She has to go to "the google" for some answers to her questions, which I understand is how Stephanie Meyer wrote the whole book because she's not allowed to leave the house and go to the library, where she might accidentally touch a book with a cuss in it.

So anyway, Bella Swan finally figures out that Teen Vampire is a vampire. The rest of the book is kind of an indistinguishable blur to me because almost all of it consists of the following dialogue:

BELLA SWAN: Teen Vampire, you're so dreamy!

TEEN VAMPIRE: But I am dangerous (and a vampire) so I totally cannot love you (but I do).

Here's the stuff that doesn't. Through cultural osmosis or exposure to bored housewives you may already know that vampires, in the mind of visionary Stephenie Meyer, can't go out into the sunlight because instead of melting or bursting into flames or the usual awesome sort of things that happen to a vampire, they sparkle. I'm led to believe that it looks sort of like what might happen if a horse sprayed glitter out of its dick all over them. It also turns out that vampires love the hell out of America, because like every red-blooded American and Harry Potter ripoff, they enjoy a good sport - baseball! Vampires love their baseball and apparently play it only in thunderstorms because they're so awesome that whenever they slam their bats (dicks) into the ball (balls), it produces a sound so loud to us mere mortals that it sounds like thunder. This is also where the evil vampires who want to eat Bella Swan for real show up, and some even dumber things happen where she has to go back to Arizona to hide from them. Theoretically this is where the "action" part of the book happens but honestly I couldn't find any of it. Suffice to say that dreamy teen vampire Edward Cullen beats up a sufficient number of evil vampires to guarantee that they can come back for a sequel and Bella Swan is safe. Except from Teen Vampire, who is still dangerous (but dreamy).

Now that you're up to speed on where our story continues. Recalling one of the few instances in which Bella Swan, Author Surrogate reveals her one actual character flaw -- she's clumsy! -- we end up at a point where she cuts herself on a piece of paper (seriously?) and this results in one of Edward Cullen, Teen Vampire's other vampire friends to completely flip out and try to eat her (Good thing she's not on the rag, because seriously? A papercut?) This of course means that Teen Vampire is much too dangerous to ever be around the lovely Bella Swan and so he has to leave forever to some other place where he can think longing thoughts about her and probably cry a lot while listening to The Cure.

Team Jacob, Future Werewolf and the person who related to Bella Swan the local myths about vampires, decides that this is his chance to move in and try to get some pussy by becoming her BFF. Unfortunately, he turns into a werewolf, but this doesn't creep her out too much because she's apparently into boning dogs (see: Eclipse, the third book, which I'm not even going to get into (without another check)). As a werewolf he is obligated by the rules laid out in all of the White Wolf books to fight some vampires, so I guess he does or something, but I'm not entirely clear on this point because I blotted it all out with alcohol. For some reason this causes Bella Swan to go overboard and totally try to kill herself because, like, that's what you do when you can't be in love with a vampire. Anyway it also turns out that Teen Vampire wants to die too because he's so lonely and his method of doing this is: Sparkling at Rome.

Normally you'd think he'd take a stake through the heart or jump off the Space Needle or something but I guess that vampires live by different rules in this world. By sparkling at Rome, not only will he probably piss off the Pope, but he'll also piss off all the Italian supervampires who are apparently in charge of all other vampires ever, who will totally do murder on him for daring to reveal to the world that vampires are not in fact awesome, but are in fact unbelievably lame. SPOILERS: He doesn't die, Bella Swan is totally immune to vampire mind powers because she represents the author, and Dumbledore is gay.

That's the story of Twilight so far.

Good night, and good luck. Maybe you'll have a sex dream about a vampire that you can turn into approximately a jillion dollars, in which case I hate you and you should die like that one guy in Robocop who gets all the toxic sludge dumped on him and then hit by a car.