The road trip continues, and the guys get all the way to Italy. Derek the bitten buddy cannot stand sunlight, and needs to sleep during the day. He cannot eat solid food, and pasta makes him vomit. However, he does not want to spend the rest of the vacation stuck in a hospital. The guys carry on with the trip, and keep filming it.
Before long Derek the bitten buddy gets a really severe sensitivity to sunburn. To balance this, he also gets superhuman strength. Nobody puts two and two together. In a twisted version of Genre Blindness they assume he is a superhero. They test his strength and speed, and video document everything. Reminiscent of Chronicle , but with a supernatural origin story rather than an alien science one.
Using vampiric superpowers to make the ultimate extreme sports video is certainly a new take on the genre. However, what the characters do not realise is that the more he exerts himself, the greater his transformation accelerates. In fact, at first they do not seem to realise that he is transforming.
Finally they Google vampires, and discover the symptoms match. They try cold cow's blood, and warm pigs blood. However, it seems like only human blood will do. The next problem is that they are Americans in Italy, where they barely speak the language and certainly cannot pass for locals.
Our heroes are not exactly master criminals. The police just have to follow their trail of destruction. Strangely it is not the Italian carabinieri, but for some reason the cops identify themselves as being from Interpol. It turns out that in a daylight police chase, a vamp is in far greater danger from the sunlight than from police bullets.
Derek realises that the only hope for a cure is if he finds the woman who bit him. He has to get to Paris, even though there are Interpol warrants out for his arrest.
US General Keith David ( The Thing (1982) ) wants to napalm the whole area. The clock ticks down until he calls in an airstrike. This is a blatant piece of phony jeopardy, taken from top-notch action film The Rock.
Luckily, Steven Seagal ( Under Siege ) and a bunch of special forces goons walk around in stylish black trench-coats. Like all real-life SWAT men should, Seagal comes with his own katana. Courtesy of the SyFy channel, of course.
There is also a mad scientist, an apparent reference to Italian zombie movie Dr Butcher . He only has a couple of scenes, however - he is terribly under-used, and most of the movie is a series of hand-to-hand encounters with the Infected.
Ethan Hawke ( Gattaca ) is a scientist working on a synthetic blood substitute. He only drinks pigs blood, though nobody has thought of mass-marketing this as a substitute. Human blood is running out, and starving vamps are degrading into full-blown Sub-suckers.
What starts out as a futuristic drama like Gattaca turns into action-adventure closer to John Carpenter's Vampire$ when our reluctant protagonist meets Willem Dafoe ( Spiderman ), a cured vamp. Together they have to fight off the Vampire Army run by Sam Neill ( The Dish ), and perfect the cure.
The protagonist teams up with a bunch of cops in SWAT armour. The extras get helmets, but the main characters (who have to be photogenic and easily identifiable) do not. Their leaders are the former Chief of Detectives (Lance Hendricksen - Terminator ) and his son (Louis Mandylor - ).
At the end of the day, this has high production values and a couple of recognisable names in the cast. Some of the supporting actors do not perform as strongly, but on a low-budget B-movie you can only expect so much.
Normally low-budget horror movies suffer by being written and directed by a single person. Luckily this effort avoided the same problem by having different specialists for each task. However, there is a different example of one participant Johnny Strong is not only the star, he is also a producer and he wrote and performed the soundtrack.
Dracula (Lugosi) travels to England, where he falls foul of Doctor Van Helsing.
Vamp-hunting priest Father Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee - Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ) works for a Vatican official named Cardinal Siqueros (Roy Scheider - SeaQuest DSV ). The next mission is to destroy the corpse of Dracula before he can come back from the dead again.
A local Professor (Craig Sheffer - Nightbreed ) is afflicted with a terrible disease, so he has his students keep an eye out for vampires in the local morgues. They find Dracula's body, so they steal it.
The Professor has a small clique – Luke (Jason London - Mallrats ) and his girlfriend Elizabeth ( Diane Neal ), as well as a hot girl ( ) and the token black guy (Khary Payton - The Walking Dead ). They experiment on the body in a remote disused building that is meant to be in Louisiana, but in reality is in Eastern Europe.
When Dracula is revived, he looks like Stephen Billington ( ). Yes, this movie re-cast the only character retained from the original movie. They could not afford Gerard Butler.
Five years after the events of the first movie, vamp-hunting priest Father Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee - Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ) is fired by Cardinal Siqueros (Roy Scheider - SeaQuest DSV so he instead teams up with Luke (Jason London - Mallrats ). Together they hunt Dracula, and discover he has gone back to his stronghold in the Carpathians.
Most of the movie is about the duo's long slog across Romania towards Drac's castle. Despite being a modern country that is a member of the European Union, it has become a hell-hole torn by insurgency and civil war. The fact that Drac's vampire horde is on the loose does not make things any better.
The plan is to rescue Elizabeth ( Diane Neal ), who is now one of the brides of Dracula. Drac himself has changed again – he now looks like Rutger Hauer ( Blade Runner ) instead of either of the previous actors.
This is a strange steampunk version of the original story. Van Helsing is the live-in lover of Mina Harker, and Mina is the lawyer assigned to help the exotic Count Dracula to purchase a home in the city. Jonathan Harker is relegated to being a conspiracy theorist. The most original aspect of the re-casting is the fact that Van Helsing is a gay woman. This may seem like a box-ticking exercise, but the Dracula story has been done so many times that it definitely needs a new angle.
The cast are a bunch of unknowns, cast for their looks - no doubt for the softcore porn audience. The budget is Television-level, since it was was shot in Eastern Europe, but this makes the weird anachronistic steampunk setting work even better.
Our hero gets suspicious when a new neighbour (Colin Farrell - Daredevil ) moves in next door. Before long he discovers that the new guy is a murderous vampire. Predictably, nobody will believe him.
Our hero calls in the local vampire expert - a theatrical magician named Peter Vincent (David Tennant - Dr Who (2005) ). Yes, the old-fashioned former horror movie actor character from the 1980s version has been updated for the Twenty-First Century.
The most impressive and original sequence is when Ed shows Charlie a web comic of Bathory's origin story. This is a great example of visual exposition, and adds a few new touches to the backstory. Bathory came to the USA aboard the Hindenberg, and was responsible for the Black Dahlia murder! Eventually she got homesick and returned home to Bucharest, where this film is set.
The boys call on Peter Vincent for help. He has been updated to a Web-TV Ghost Facer type, which is a lot more modern than the old 1980s-style actor-turned-TV presenter.
Despite being a remake of a remake, shot on the cheap in Eastern Europe, this is actually quite a decent film. The Romanian setting actually works for it, as does the cynical genre-savvy approach of the script.
Jonathan Harker visits Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski - ), a freakish bald man with pale skin and unusual dental traits. The Count travels to Europe, while Harker is left trapped in the man's decaying castle. Eventually Harker escapes and gives pursuit.
The climax involves Harker's fiance Lisa ( Isabelle Adjani ), who outsmarts the vampire and traps him in a subtle but breathtaking scene.
The ending is also a twisted one, which is shockingly memorable and well-executed.
The main difference between this movie and the original, other than the title character's name, is that Klaus Kinski's portrayal is more sympathetic. Note - within two years, Kinski's daughter ( Nastasja Kinski ) starred in Cat People .
The Sheriff (Cam Gigandet - Twilight (2008) ) gets help from a Priest (Paul Bettany - A Knight's Tale ). The Priests are a special unit of vampire-slayers. Unfortunately their leadership does not believe in the rescue mission, so they send Maggie Q to bring Bettany back.
The villainous leader of the vamps (Karl Urban - Dredd 3-D ) used to be a Priest himself. Underneath his black hat (yes, not exactly subtle) he still has the symbolic tattoo of the crucifix.
As befitting the Western movie cliches, the searchers get reluctant assistance from a snake-oil salesman (Brad Douriff - Child's Play ). And like all anachronistic sci-fi westerns these days, this has a climactic battle aboard a speeding steam-train.
The storyline may be derivative, but this is still a well-shot action-adventure film. If you are looking for an enjoyable if brainless action flick, you could do a lot worse than this one. There is lots of CGI which takes no account of the laws of physics, and as a result the action scenes seem quite cartoonish. However, they are very pretty and nice to look at. Perhaps this is because it is based on a Korean graphic novel.
The film starts with a prelude that sets the tone. A woman helps an injured man into a mysterious temple. Unfortunately this leads up to a human sacrifice.
The main story concerns a couple who go hiking in the woods. They meet a stranger (Nicholas Brandon - Buffy The Vampire Slayer ) who claims to be a Park Ranger. He certainly does not seem to be the type.
That night, things get reminiscent of the prelude sequence to Dog Soldiers . The difference being that instead of werewolves, they discover the woods are full of vampires.
The shed is in the back yard of the protagonist's house. Its new inhabitant changes the life of the protagonist, a teenager who is bullied by everyone - his grandfather, the cops and the High School gang. His best friend, Dahmer, wants to use the vampire to get even with his enemies.
The pair are driving north to Canada, rather than West to California. They team up with a couple of women - a raped nun ( Kelly Mcgillis ) and a pregnant girl ( Danielle Harris ). They also run into a klan of bible-thumpers led by Jebediah (Michael Cerveris - Fringe ).
A gang of vampires come looking for revenge. They destroy sanctuary, but let the tweenage boy go. After all, the only choice he has is to find the middle-aged man. Naturally, the vamps are following him.
Steven Williams ( The X-Files ) pops up at one of the surviving human settlements.
There are some strangers in town. Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks and his GF, Elizabeth Gracen , are camping nearby. Also, a nerdy young vamp-hunter (Bruce Campbell - Evil Dead ) arrives in town.
Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer - Willow ) earns a living by doing book-signings at bookstores. He ends up in a small redneck town where the nearest thing to a bookstore is a shelf in the hardware store. Sheriff Bruce Dern ( Hateful Eight ) pulls him in to investigate the Vampiric murder of Virginia ( Elle Fanning ).
Baltimore has to pay alimony to his wife (played by Kilmer's RL ex-wife Joanne Whalley ). As a result he talks his Publisher (David Paymer - Chill Factor ) into accepting the book. Unfortunately this means he has to solve the murder. Luckily he is helped by the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin - Dorian Grey ).
The story's reliance on dream sequences (rendered in monochrome, like in Sin City ) makes it inaccessible to a mainstream audience, who find it confusing.
The plot is pretty much a rip-off from Blade 2 . Humans and vamps are being attacked by gargoyles - stone-faced flying vamps. But who created the virus that turns vamps into gargoyles?