Dracula 3000 (2004)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) The notion of a bad movie is elastic—some will nominate big-budget Hollywood studio movies for “worst movie of the year” Razzies, even though there are several lower levels of hell on the way down to truly abominable movies. Dracula 3000 is fairly down on that ladder—wretched but not wretched enough to be completely unwatchable. Taking the Dracula story to set it aboard a spaceship in a premise clearly cribbed from Alien, it’s clearly from screenwriters who don’t understand science fiction, failed remedial physics and couldn’t be bothered writing more than a simplified third-generation copy of the Dracula story. Everything takes place in the year 3000, albeit with early-2000s movie clichés. The tin-eared dialogue seems almost parodic at times with its precise references to the 2950s, and I hope it was the French dub that introduced nonsense such as “Transylvania is a planet in the Carpathian Galaxy” (upon checking: no, that’s in the original) (Actually, looking over some quotes in their original version, it’s obvious that I missed much of the film’s charm by watching it in French—the dub may make a bit more sense, but it’s lacking the joyous inanity of the original). The writers use the same names as the public-domain Stoker novel, but other than having a character named van Helsing trace his genealogy all the way to 1800s Earth, don’t get your hopes up for anything as clever as even a remake of the original story. The villain is ridiculous, the story doesn’t make any sense and the staging is terrible—there’s really not much left to watch. The cast, however, is a surprising blend of C-grade celebrities, from Coolio to Casper Van Dien to Erika Eleniak and Tommy Tiny Lister. But as bad as the film is, there’s a specific kind of entertainment in watching it unfold. The raunchy dialogue (in a nudity-free film!) is in a class of its own, and the ending is essentially a big sex joke, certainly the most upbeat everybody-dies ending I’ve seen in a long while. Do I recommend Dracula 3000? Not to you, not in general, not to any unsuspecting soul—but I may share it with a few bad-movie enthusiasts and see what they think about it.