Please, Amy Heckerling, No More Vampires

One day this vampire obsession will end. I know this to be true, because one day the world will end. That may be sooner than we’d like to think, if Roland Emmerich or the Large Hadron Collider have their way, or it may be so far into the future that the few surviving humanoids will be refugees on K-Pax, and presumably more interested in their survival than watching bloodsuckers boink. Presumably. Of course, a betting man, one interested in making some cash money hoes off the vamp frenzy, would probably wager that the bloodlust will peter out sometime between now and when Eclipse comes out, True Blood is past its prime, and it’s revealed that The Vampire Diaries' Ian Somerhalder has made some deal with the devil for eternal youth (those eyes are not human). In other words, if you were still looking to capitalize on this trend, you would want to be able to do it today (or this past Saturday), or consider getting into the werewolf market, because when it comes to this whole vampire thing, we, the American body politic, are just about sucked dry. So it is a bummer, if no surprise, that Amy Heckerling, the director responsible for two of the best teen movies ever made (Clueless and Fast Times and Ridgemont High) and a bunch of crap since, has decided her next project will be about ... vampires!

Heckerling, whose last movie I Could Never Be Your Woman starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd and still went straight to DVD, and whose film before that, 2000’s Loser, bet on Jason Biggs as a leading man, is at work on a film called Vamps. SlashFilm reports its a “vampire romantic comedy” about “two young female vampires living the good life in New York until love enters the picture and each has to make a choice that will jeopardize their immortality” and will star Krysten Ritter as one of the leads. If you take the “vampires” and “choice that will jeopardize their immortality” out of that pitch, there’s a Heckerling movie that could be worth seeing: Clueless may have been Emma in High School, but it was all the non-Emma, ‘90s specific observations (“I don’t want to be a traitor to my generation, but I don’t get how boys dress these days ...”) that made it so hilarious and heartfelt. Sure, Heckerling needs a hit, and vampires seem to be the gift that keep on giving, but it’s going to be over soon and some studios are going to be left holding the hot, fang bitten potato. Heckerling should make sure it’s not her. One more stake and she’s done.