Watching Catherine Hardwicke's big-screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Novel Twilight is easily summed up with a single word: painful.

Remember the feeling of those excruciating and simultaneously awkward moments in high school? Twilight is a bit like being forced to relive those moments.

Twilight offers acting as awkward a pubescent boy with gastro-intestinal cramping. - photo courtesy of Summit Entertainment

Everything from the dialogue to the acting is like watching a pubescent boy after a four inch growth spurt try to figure out how his seemingly new body works.

A quick synopsis: girl moves to small town, girl meets vampire hunk and girl falls in love with vampire hunk who struggles the whole time not to devour girl. Can you feel my disdain?

The movie stumbles between trying to portray teenage angst, the confusion of teenage love and the vampires' struggle with what they are. In the end, all that is achieved is having the characters appear they have bad cases of gastro-intestinal cramping.

The overly-dramatic and cheesy dialogue just adds to the horror. It would have been easier to watch if the vampires were brutally hacking up the students and throwing their dismembered pieces at the screen.

Twilight's main characters are Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart of Jumper and Into the Wild) and Edward Cullen, (Robert Pattinson of Harry Potter fame) are so unbelievable that it is nearly impossible to take their developing relationship seriously.

Take the worst parts of Dracula, Lost Boys, Beverly Hills 90210 and Angel, mix them together and you have the total flop of a film that Twilight is. About as original as dry white toast, the imagery in the movie was like watching bad re-enactments from 100 other vampire movies.

The worst part is – oh yes, it does get worse – through the whole movie you can see what the director and the screenwriter were trying to achieve.

You saw the outline of the enigmatic vampire brood, Bella struggling to belong, avoiding being the community's newest tourist attraction and maintaining a strained relationship with her father. You also got the sense of the vampires' struggle to avoid giving into to their most basic desire. You could see these intentions and could do nothing but stare in horror as they failed time and time again. What you're left with is a superficial husk of old stinky cheese which, with better writing and directing, could have been a good movie.

But apparently you can't beat hype, and by slapping a few pretty faces on the screen you get mile-long lineups and millions in revenue.