#45 Die Hard Dracula (Wes)

Die Hard Dracula

Sometimes when I look at what our next film will be I like to guess what it’ll involve. Sometimes I’m right, but only when the title is really obvious (and even then I would be sometimes wrong if I hadn’t seen Troll 2 (see here) before). Most of the time my predictions of what the movie will entail are completely off though. So when I saw that our next movie was called Die Hard Dracula and I had visions of Christopher Lee in a vest, biting terrorists who were trying to rob a skyscraper I bet you can guess which way my predictions fell…

After Steven’s (Denny Sachen) girlfriend Julia (Kerry Dustin) dies in a waterskiing accident, he decides to travel to Europe to get over her death. Whilst travelling from Prague to Moravia his car breaks down and he finds himself in the small town of Dubova where Julia’s double Carla lives (who was brought back to life after drowning by Steven's wish or something. Oh and is also played by Kerry Dustin). Dubova is also home to Dracula (Ernest M. Garcia, Chaba Hrotko and Tom McGowan), and the locals call in vampire hunter Van Helsing (Bruce Glover) when a local woman goes missing. Once Van Helsing confirms that Dracula really is a vampire (by using garlic bread. Peter Kay would be proud!), Steven and Van Helsing team up to defeat Dracula who seems incredibly hard to kill, They try everything they can think of from the traditional ways to kill the undead, silver bullets, crosses etc to more modern methods like grenades. Perhaps if they just called Buffy, The Frog Brothers or even The Monster Squad they’d have gotten the job done much faster and this Dracula wouldn’t bite quite so much…

Well I never thought I’d watch a vampire movie that made me want to watch Twilight instead, and I’m happy to report that that’s still the case. But only just. Die Hard Dracula is an awful movie, and not in a good way. The director and writer, Peter Horak, was attempting to make a horror comedy, and to be fair he succeeded completely. However he managed to make a film where the horror is laughable and the comedy is horrific, so he perhaps didn’t quite succeed in everything he set out to do.

You can tell how bad the horror aspect of this film will be just by watching the first thirty seconds. Starting with a voice over of how Vlad the Impaler punished his enemies by impaling them on spikes. This is accompanied by images of people sitting on wooden poles, with some of them even shifting to get more comfortable during filming. You half expect them to start sing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life it looks so unconvincing.

Similarly you can tell exactly how bad the comedy in this movie is going to be in just over three minutes, when Dracula’s coffin floats from a crypt, while Dracula himself says in a voice over how fed up of all the praying he is (after 300 years – you’d have think he may have acted sooner. I just wish everyone was so patient. I only have to play my Slayer records at full volume at 1am and my neighbours are complaining straight away!). The coffin then proceeds to fly into the country to his castle as Wagner’s Ride of the Valkryies plays. To make it worse the computer graphics used to make the coffin fly, look as though they were last used for the 80s kids tv show Knightmare.

Dracula in this movie is less scary than Count Chocula. It doesn’t help that for some reason they decided to hire three actors to play him, one of which I think was used to dub over his voice. Unfortunately whoever did this has less of a talent for accents than Sean Connery. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Tommy Wiseau from The Room (see here) sound like he’s about to ask where the “nuclear wessels” are, then this is the movie for you. I often wondered whatever happened to Officer Crabtree from Allo Allo after the war, but I now suspect he may have gone into voice acting… (if  for some reason Arthur Bostrum ever reads this… I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t really you!)

The people who played the roles of the characters in this movie (it really would be a stretch to refer to them as actors) really are the most amateurish bunch since Troll 2 and its interesting hiring policies. A few of them have managed to make an acting career of sorts, most notably Bruce Glover (who was in a Bond film! I think he may have played the hatstand in Miss Moneypenny's office once or something), but on the evidence of this film how they’ve done it is a mystery that would take a combination of Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, The Scooby Gang and Mike Tyson to even begin to solve.

What really didn’t help this movie is that they have a reverse Eddie Murphy philosophy when it comes down to portraying Dracula. Whilst they may not have had the budget of Norbit (see here) or more relevantly Bram Stoker’s Dracula (with Gary Oldman playing both young and old Dracula), I’m sure they could have found a make-up artist who could make up one actor to portray Dracula in his various states rather than have three separate actors make a hash of it.

Although released in 1998, this movie looks cheaper than an average Roger Corman movie (the difference being that Corman knew how to make great movies with a low budget). It’s so low budget that at one point in a dungeon scene they even used a plastic rat on a piece of string rather than a real rat! 1998 was the year that DVDs were launched in Europe (and also the year Neflix began its operations in the US, and it seems like the last year it bought any films for the UK version), so you’d think that just maybe producers would be looking to the future and trying to make their movies look sharper and more professional. The makers of Die Hard Dracula unfortunately still seemed to be banking on Betamax to make a miracle last second comeback though and decided that making a movie that looked as though it was an episode of the Australian Neighbours from the 80s was the way forward.

I was partially right about my predictions for this movie, putting this film into your DVD player is basically the movie equivalent of a bunch of terrorists hijacking a building on Christmas Eve. Only in the real world you rarely have Bruce Willis to save the day and come out with snappy one-liners whilst doing it. So be warned! Should you come across this movie, then it should be staked through the heart, have it's head removed and be buried face down under a crossroads at midnight. It’s the only sensible way to try to make sure it stays dead and buried forever, which is where it belongs.

#45 Die Hard Dracula (1998) (Colin)

Cast: Bruce Glover, Denny Sachen, Kerry Dustin, Ernest M. Garcia, Chaba Hrotko, Tom McGowan

Director: Peter Horak

Genre: Comedy, Horror

Our next movie is based on a character which has appeared in COUNTless movies before; Dracula, (see what I did there?). 

There’s Bela Lugosi’s 1931 early Dracula, which is better than his role in Plan 9, (however, this is mainly because he’s not dead during filming), (click here for my Plan 9 blog)).  Or Christopher Lee’s superb Dracula in the Hammer Horror series, (this is the version which leaps to my mind when thinking about the caped nibbler). 

I even like Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (1992), which admittedly did drag, but which I thought Oldman’s performance was brilliant.  And yes, like most kids in the 90’s, I did go out and buy myself a pair of blue shaded sunglasses.  Oldman looked cool, I looked a tit.

With so many Dracula movies already produced was there room for one more and is this modern interpretation something to sink your teeth into or did it just bite?

Steven, (Danny Sachen), is devastated when his girlfriend, Julia, (Kerry Dustin), drowns during a water skiing accident.  Being a Disney fan, he wishes upon a star that a recently drowned women will come back to life, (he then boards a big eared elephant and flies to Europe). 

The star misunderstands and brings Carla, (Kerry Dustin, again) back to life!  Confusingly she looks exactly like Julia, has also recently drowned and just so happens to live in the same Czech Republic village that Steven is on his way to…..

Steven has a car accident on his way to the village and wakes up in a pub owned by Carla’s dad.  Confused when he sees Julia’s doppelganger staring back at him, Steven realises that his wish must have brought her back to life, (well d’uh!).  He finds out that this is not Julia, but in fact Carla and promptly forgets all about his old squeeze and starts to fall in love with this new, alive version.

Meanwhile, Carla’s friend, Dana, (Nathalie Huot), disappears down by the lake with no trace except some blood stained clothes.  The men of the village believe that local resident and pain in the neck, Count Dracula, must be active again.  They waste no time and recruit Dracula’s greatest enemy, Van Helsing, (Bruce Glover).

Helsing and Steven set about trying to defeat Dracula by visiting his castle and trying different ways to succeed in their task.  Silver bullets do not work, a grenade is batted out of play by a violin wielding Dracula and stakes are of the menu, (sorry). 

The pair are ready to give up but are shaken back into action when Carla is kidnapped……

Will Steven and Helsing manage to rescue Carla before she is turned into a vampire?  Can they finally defeat Dracula?  Will the film makers actually spend any of the budget on the movie?

The answer to the last question is yes, but they managed to get change from a fiver. 

Die Hard Dracula looks cheap, feels cheap and sounds cheap.  No expense was paid in order to produce this movie.  I should have liked it but as I write this blog, I am still undecided.

The acting is bad, I mean really bad, stupendously bad, Madonna bad!  Sachen is not a strong enough actor for the lead role.  Also the character of Steven may have the sports body and good looks, but he is whiny throughout. This is not the trait you want from the guy you hope saves the day and you end up wanting his neck to have 2 puncture wounds by the end of the movie.

Dustin had 2 roles and both of them were quite poor.  Admittedly, Julia was not in the movie for long but her falling into the water and drowning was a worse dive than a Premiership footballer.  Carla’s character, on the other hand, could not decide where she was from and straddled between East European, East Coast USA and East Anglia.  2 bites of the acting cherry, 2 epic fails.

Bruce Glover is probably the most famous actor, (Mr. Wint from Diamonds are Forever, (1971)), but his Helsing is just a comic character and a far cry from the arch nemesis of Dracula and dark Vampire hunter usually portrayed on the silver screen.  Dracula need not fear this Helsing as he couldn’t defeat Sesame Street’s The Count, Count Duckula or Grandpa from the Munsters. 

As for Dracula?  Well he is played by 3 actors and there seems to be fat Dracula, old Dracula and not so old Dracula.  None are scary, none are noteworthy and none will work again. 

Two things puzzle me about this Dracula.  Firstly, why does he all of a sudden have the ability to fire lightning bolts like Count Dooku from Star Wars?  Did the writer and director Peter Horak get confused between the 2 Counts as I’ve not encountered this special ability before?  Is this like Superman IV, when a desperate director threw in a load of new superpowers in an attempt to make a character more interesting? (click here for my Superman IV blog)

Secondly, why is he over-dubbed throughout the movie?  This is just really weird and as this is not a foreign film being dubbed into English, I am at a lost as to why they have done this?  The sound is pretty lousy and is recorded in glorious chewed up cassette tape, so an over-dub was probably needed, but for the entire movie…..?

The soundtrack is just lifted from the aforementioned chewed up cassette tape and is just a compilation of music recorded from Classic FM.  The opening title music is ‘Dance of the Knights’, which in the UK is best known as the title music for the UK version of The Apprentice.  This immediately gives the start an unintentionally funny beginning as all I can think off throughout is Lord Sir Alan of Sugar grumpily shouting he’s ‘not a happy bunny’ at Dracula and to Steven, ‘You had one job, bump Dracula off and you made a right mess of it, you’re a bloody shambles, you’re fired!’.

So was this a movie to sink your teeth into or did it just bite?  The answer is, I can’t make my mind up.

The problem is Horak doesn’t seem to know if he is making a horror or comedy movie.  Ironically, the horror bits are funny and the comedy bits are unfunny.  I wish they had stuck to the horror genre as I think we could have had an unintentionally funny movie on our hands and it would have been considered so bad it’s good.

Throughout the movie, I was reminded of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, (2003), (click here for my The Room blog), not in terms of story, but in the sense that when it takes itself too seriously that is when it is at it’s entertaining best as it becomes so funny. But the problem is the comedy bits appear and the movie falls flat again and you end up bored and uninterested.

So if you like horror, this film is not for you.  If you like comedy, this film is not for you.  If you like bad movies, this film might be for you.  Watch it and let me know what you think in our comments section below, because a bit like Die Hard Dracula, I’m a confused mess.

#46 Crossover (Wes)

Crossover

I’ve never been a sporty person. I never liked playing it, and have mostly used watching it as an excuse to get drunk. As for sports movies, they’re something I will rarely even consider watching. So you can imagine my enthusiasm when the next movie to rear it’s head was a movie about basketball. Now I actually like basketball as a game, but this far into our list I’ve stopped hoping for Teen Wolf and now just accept that I’m going to get Teen Wolf Too instead…

Tech (Anthony Mackie), Cruise (Wesley Jonathan) and Up (Lil’ JJ) are all members of a streetball (like basketball, but with less rules, and played in street courts) team, that are good, but just can’t beat a rival team called Platinum, led by Jewelz (Hot Sauce). Cruise is a skilled player and is pursued by sports agent Vaughn (Wayne Brady), but wants to pursue a career in medicine, and is worried that playing streetball will affect his scholarship to UCLA, whereas Tech wants to follow the money that a career in basketball promises, and to kick his rivals right in the family Jewelz. Whilst Tech and Up hustle the local basketball courts to make money, Cruise shows off all his medical knowledge by not using any contraception whilst playing Doctors and Nurses and his new found girlfriend Vanessa (Eva Pigford) announces that she’s pregnant. Will this stop Cruise becoming a doctor? Will the team play and finally defeat Platinum? Will Up live to become an old man who has way too many balloons? Have I finally discovered a miracle cure for my insomnia by watching this movie? 

Like I said I don’t really watch many sports related movies, the only ones I can think of that I like (not counting documentaries or martial arts based movies) are Slap Shot, Caddyshack, Cool Runnings, Raging Bull, Rocky, Escape to Victory, Whip It, The Wrestler, Teen Wolf and Happy Gilmore. So out of the hundreds of sports movies made, I like ten, half of which are comedies. That really didn’t give Crossover much chance of impressing me really, the saving grace here could have been rising star Anthony Mackie playing Tech.

Anthony Mackie is a decent actor (in other movies at least). You’d probably recognise him from his performance as Sam Wilson (AKA The Falcon) in various Marvel movies starting with Captain America: The Winter Soldier or possibly from The Hurt Locker or Million Dollar Baby if superheroes aren’t your thing. So the question here, as it’s been pondered so many times with other actors, is how did he end up in such a low grade piece of shit as this?

It was a low budget movie, so obviously he didn’t fly into the air with his eyes replaced by dollar signs (I’m sure that’s what may have happened to Michael Jordan when he was asked to do Space Jam), and he’d had the starring role in a few movies before this, so it wasn’t just the first opportunity for that to happen that led to such a poor decision. Unfortunately this unwise choice also led to him putting in a painfully average performance, which is a shame as a strong performance from him may have lifted this movie just high enough in people’s regards so that Colin and I didn’t have to endure this god-awful movie.

But you can’t blame the failure of a movie on one actor alone, especially when most of the rest of the cast are so inept. Wesley Jonathan wasn’t too bad, but working with a script that could have been written by pulling random tiles from a Scrabble bag really didn’t help. This random script generator also seems to have been applied to the naming of many of the characters in this film. It’s either that or they were named by the 1977 Palitoy marketing division (Stretch, Double A, Big Man, Up, Jewelz, Walrus Man, Hammerhead and Sand People)…

As far as direction goes Preston A. Whitmore II (who also wrote the terrible screenplay) seems to start with fast paced camera shots, which are more reminiscent of Uwe Bolls ham-fisted attempts to be edgy than anything else. My original tweet when watching this movie was “This is like watching Guy Ritchie’s take on a basketball themed Masterchef with added whoosh effects for every camera move.” However a mixture between a cheesy soap opera, a 90’s Nickleodeon show and a low budget music video soon replaces this motion sickness inducing camera work. Even the basketball scenes lack the excitement they should have and end up being little more than a montage of slow motion slam-dunks which make you yearn for the days of werewolves and cartoon rabbits doing this.

Surprisingly it wasn’t really the sport angle of this film that left me cold, it’s just a boring movie in general. This seems completely at odds with the basketball/streetball angle of the movie, as it’s such a fast paced sport, the pace would have been better suited to a movie about cricket. In basketball terms this movie is a flagrant foul that leads to a rimshot. Avoid this like you would a backcourt violation.