Fans get sucked into romantic tension

Girls, if you have been wondering if your date might actually be dead, be encouraged. Dead guys can be hot, too.

Guys, here is the perfect date movie – especially if your date is 13 years old and just got her braces off.

Daddies? Do you know where your daughter is tonight? Be warned. She might be out with a vampire.

There’s something for everyone in “Twilight.” Directed by Catherine Hardwicke with fine pacing and a hot eye for swooning glances, the movie delivers gooey love stuff but somehow  manages to  keep a straight face. Hardwicke and her scriptwriter, Melissa Rosenberg, have approached Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling “young adult” novel with the respect due for something that is likely to sell a lot of tickets even with unknown actors.

For the fans, such as those who screamed at the first sight of vampire-boy Edward Cullen at a recent screening, it is perhaps enough to say that the movie is mostly faithful to the book. For the rest, it has some attraction, too.

Even the guys who may be dragged to the movie by their dates will find there are ample action scenes – vampires that fly through the air with speed; a baseball game played during a thunderstorm with an awesome fastball; and a grand finale when a bad-vampire teen faces off with the good-vampire Edward and ultimately faces the same kind of hot time that Joan of Arc made famous.

Pattinson is being called the “undead James Dean” and, yes, he does have, at times, that woebegone, vulnerable, bemused look of Jimmy, back when he first established the teen rebel in our pop culture consciousness.

Edward, though, has diet problems. He falls madly in love with Bella Swan, the shy new girl who has just moved to rainy Washington state from sunny Phoenix . (There’s obviously a reason why Edward likes cloudy weather.)

She has a problem,  too. She’s human. If he goes for the neck, she’ll have to give up her life – or, at least the human form of it. She’s obviously willing but, somehow, the audience is kept in suspense as she exposes her neck. Will he bite her or kiss her? There hasn’t been so much romantic tension since Romeo had to consider whether to go for the bottle. (Or was it the blade?) In any case, Meyer has more of an eye toward franchise sales than did Bill Shakespeare. She isn’t about to let her lovers do anything that can’t be carried over into a sequel.

Kristen Stewart, as Bella, is suitably introspective in convincing us that she’s not a cheerleader but a thinker – the kind that might go for an individualist like Edward. She’ll never replace Natalie Wood, but perhaps that’s a generational thing.

Complete with wide vista shots of the great Pacific Northwest, the movie is not the low-budgeted cheapie some had expected. Hardwicke, a veteran of chasing teen ticketbuyers, does better here than she did with the flopperoo “Lords of Dogtown,” the downbeat drugs of “Thirteen” or the teen bride of “The Nativity Story.” She has the good sense to hold the close-ups long enough for the blood to flow freely through the veins. That, apparently, is all it takes.

To neck or not to neck. That is the question.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com