I going to try to be fair with this one, since I’m clearly not the targeted demographic. This movie delivers what it intends to deliver, which is a 90 proof dose of teenage girls’ sexual fantasies.

Twilight involves a girl named Bella (Kristen Stewart) who goes to live with her father in a small town in a remote part of Washington state. At her new high school she is fascinated by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a pale young man with large sensuous lips who stares at her with a look of burning hunger. (Or maybe it’s just a bad case of indigestion. It’s a bit hard to tell at first.)

Actually all the members of Edward’s family look like that: pale and sort of gothic, and with good reason, since they are all vampires. However they are good, “vegetarian” vampires who eat only animal blood.

To my mind, this sort of thing robs the vampire myth of much of its power. If you are immortal and beautiful and rich, but you aren’t actually undead and you don’t have to kill humans, that doesn’t seem like much of a curse, no matter how much Edward wails about it. These vampires are just having too much fun.

There are also some bad vampires who do want to kill humans, and some Native Americans who obviously don’t approve of vampires (though it is strongly hinted that that is because said Native Americans are actually werewolves.) There’s plenty of action and brooding passion and romance, and it all builds up to a suitably thrilling climax.

Then after the climax they spend at least 10 minutes setting things up for a sequel. Fair warning: my daughter is skeptical about whether the sequel will be worth watching. She says that the second book in the series this is based on is mostly an extended setup for the third book. But we’ll leave that problem for another day.