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.
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