#DRCL midnight children, vol 3 – review

Art and story: Shin'ichi Sakamoto

First published: 2024 (UK)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Dracula meets manga in this surreally beautiful and chilling retelling of Bram Stoker’s quintessential horror classic.

In this beautiful, evocative, and often surreal retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a fearsome enemy comes from the east, bringing with it horrors the likes of which have never been seen in the British Empire. Standing opposed are Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray and her stalwart companions, united in a cabal that eclipses gender, nationality, and station until the day that they can achieve victory.

With Lucy’s life hanging in the balance, tempers flare and tensions rise as Arthur, Quincey, Joe, and Mina struggle to decide who is best suited to offer aid to their precious friend. However, the sudden appearance of Count Dracula may render all their efforts for naught. Will centuries of humanity’s collected knowledge be enough to hold back the count’s advance, or will wisdom and logic falter in the face of the undead king’s maddening presence?

The review: As regular readers will know, the manga #DRCL (and the reason for the title is given in this volume, by the way) has fast become a favourite. Glorious art with a fantastic queer retelling of the story, it takes its broad brushstrokes from Stoker but has created something different but marvellous. You can read my over reviews for vol 1 and Vol 2.

This volume starts with the report in the press of Dracula at the zoo but rather than a story where he frees one particular wolf, Bersicker, he takes all the wolves held there and this leads to a magnificent image (I found the Japanese rendition of it to post below) of Dracula, flying through the London skyline on a wolf drawn sleigh.

The volume is essentially the fall of Lucy/Luke – Lucy is given a gender fluid identity, Luke during the day and Lucy at night. When Dracula tries to take her, Mina spots the deceit as the heroes believe day has broken but Luke ignores Mina (as she is a girl) whereas Lucy and Mina are friends and so her speaking to Mina makes her realise that Dracula has manipulated their senses.

I enjoyed some of Van Helsing’s supposition being broken – such as garlic, with Dracula actually eating the garlic flowers, and him being nonplussed when the students sing a Protestant hymn and hold Dracula and his wolves off with it (something not contained within his books, with a view implied that Catholicism is needed). There is a shockingly gory death and Lucy, once a vampire, taking on an insect-like form. Notable is the fact that although Luke/Lucy was non-binary, the vampirism has forced a binary existence on Lucy due to her new nocturnal life.

The series remains a firm favourite. 9 out of 10.

In Hardback @ Amazon US

In Hardback @ Amazon UK

Honourable Mention: Acid Babylon

I previously looked at Cosmotropia de Xam’s earlier film Phantasmagoria 2: Labyrinths of blood, yet despite that being earlier than this 2020 release, that film is shown as a ‘coming soon’ at the beginning of this. The trailer to P2 actually worked better for me than the actual film did, being genuinely off kilter without highlighting the performances that would kill that vehicle.

This film is even more arthouse than the previous, with less of a narrative (a degree of narrative is offered in some scant, French language narration). Early euro-horror has again inspired the filmmaking but, rather than the very Franco-centric inspiration of P2, this has a range of inspiration (and used a range of their filming locations). These are listed as Rollin, Argento, Anger, Kumel and Herzog. The lack of narrative and, though the central character is described as half vampire and half human, the lack of vampire imagery/activity, has led me to give this an honourable mention.

the woman

The film consists of images, actors in movement, psychedelic overlays, filters and negatives with a soundtrack that had elements of drone and almost an ambient industrial quality. Together with the visual effects this makes for a darkly meditative piece that is arthouse with no discernible mainstream hook. This means, of course, that you will likely find yourself liking or disliking it.

another dimension

As I mentioned, there is no real narrative thread. The narration tells us that when the rivers ran red the vampires left Babylon, leaving one woman who was immortal – being half vampire (the daughter of Nosferatu, it is suggested). The second half of the film sees the world filtered heavily with negative photography and I got a feel of passing into the other dimension that occasionally is referenced in Rollin’s films.

blood on fingers

We get quotes from the book of Revelations on screen – specifically from Chapter 17 pursuant to Babylon. But, at this point there is little else to say – from a filmic sense there is little to put into synopsis, from a vampire sense there is little lore communicated and no vampiric activity/tropes to relay (bar some blood on fingers dripped into a mouth). As mentioned, you will either like or dislike this.

The imdb page is here.

Dracula: the Count’s Kin – review

Director: Eric Pascarelli

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

An indie low budget flick, it does show as it shies away from gore sequences and even attacks to a degree. The film works towards crime drama but the supernatural element overwhelms the detective story they wanted to tell, I felt.

It starts with Simon (Jamie Nolan) looking to go on a date from a dating app. He arrives at the house where Anna Marie (a false profile) lives. In fact, she is Elizabeth (Leanne Johnson) and way prettier than her profile pic, he says. He isn’t too phased at her red eyes as she mojos him and before you can say “vampire” he is a snack.

Simon as the creepy house

Monika (Daisy Paroczy Hickey) has met up with her friend Devin (Holly Anspaugh) and is explaining that the man she has been in communication with has been using false pictures and is definitely married – she essentially did a deep dive investigation of the guy. She also meets up with her adopted sister (Amanda Winston) who mentions a job going at a detective agency. Monika had been a caregiver to an Aunt for some time.

James Tackett as Walter

Private eye Walter (James Tackett) has been visited by Simon’s overprotective mother (Kim Lea Mays) who believes that something has happened to her son but the police have refused to get involved (due to the short timescales). He takes the case as Monika arrives, armed with her criminology degree but no experience. He takes her on, however, as he has had no other applications for the post. She visits Simon’s home and quickly manages to ping his phone to give the location of his rendezvous. Meanwhile Walter meets his cop contact and there are similar disappearances and at least one body drained of blood.

Monika investigates

Monika and Walter go to the house where Simon had his date, the door is open and so they enter, but the place seems deserted. Monika has a UV light and uses it to find a message in blood on the floor, which says, “Follow your blood Monika”. She wipes her name away before showing Walter. The owner (Dashawn Kelley) who rents the place out approaches with a knife, demanding to know who they are, but the situation is diffused and Monika and Walter wait outside for the cops. It is later that they discover the “owner” made himself scarce as, in reality, he is the daylight servant of Elizabeth. Elizabeth has designs on Monika, with her Romanian heritage, to resurrect her lost brother Vlad.

Leanne Johnson as Elizabeth

So, there were elements of this that were just a little off. The message in blood seemed odd as, when it would have been written (and then wiped away so that it was only visible under UV), Monika will not likely have been working for Walter. It presupposes that she will apply for the job, get it, find the location and bring a UV light (and then manage to wipe her name away where cleaning did not spoil the message). As Elizabeth clearly knew who she was it would have been far easier to just find her and mojo her. Equally, there is a hair at a crime scene and Monika persuades the cops to carbon date it. Firstly I doubt the police would agree, especially as carbon dating something from after 1950 is pointless. When they discover it is 600 years old they just decide it is from a wig anyway.

a rare blood moment

Nevertheless, the Monika character was earnest enough (though her keep leaving her home, which is under protective observation when they decide she has been targeted as a victim, seemed more than a little off). Elizabeth was played well also. However the supernatural side overwhelmed any detective aspect, the police/PI relationship was awfully chummy and kills were mostly non-gore and very often off screen. All-in-all a little lacklustre but anything less than 4 out of 10 seems unfair.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Death Streamer – review

Director: Charles Band

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

Full Moon Pictures return to the vampire genre, this time with Charles Band himself at the helm and we get a fairly short feature with a limited number of main cast and sets, which manages to be interesting as a concept and starts to explore the world of the influencer but falls short of providing a social commentary (not that it needs to) and limits itself in the process.

streaming

It starts in, what seems at first glance, a sparsely attended masquerade party where some of the female guests may be hiding their faces but not their breasts, but is latter described as an S&M club. A person, later revealed as Arturo Valenor (Sean Ohlman), puts on some glasses and we see, POV, that they are a camera live streaming and shows the views and subs. He walks to a blond woman (Piper Parks) and pulls her hair, then beckons to follow him – which she does.

ready to attack

He takes her to a bar area and the bartender takes a drink and doses it with something red (and blood like). Arturo takes the glasses off and offers her the drink but she is reluctant – perhaps it is drugged? He admits it is and demands she drinks it, which she eventually does and, afterwards, he states it was his blood. She is inebriated and half carried, half dragged by a man wearing a gimp mask into a room with a bed, her dress pulled down. Arturo, wearing the glasses again, bites her…

broadcasting the Church of Chills

The film then flips to an intro for a web show called Church of Chills – a paranormal show hosted by the acerbic Alex (Aaron McDaniel), who is assisted by Edwina (Emma Massalone) and Juniper (Kaitlin Moore). It is internet schlock, broadcast from a disused church. As they prep for the next episode Juniper finds the stream from Arturo but it is dismissed by Alex as fake. When they find further footage they change his mind and they put the feed into one of their episodes.

following the stream to its source

This gets Arturo’s attention and he manages to track them down psychically – a cool idea that he can follow the source of their stream that way, a tad blown by depicting it as a pair of giant floating eyes (a pov camera would have been more effective). He is less than pleased but daylight breaks the link… Juniper decides to run, Alex preps to broadcast more (by putting garlic powder round the church entrances and making bodged together crosses) and Edwina researches – discovering that Arturo had tried to bring about the vampire apocalypse a century before but now has the means to gather followers to succeed.

bloodied

With essentially two primary internal locations (the club and the church interior) with a couple of external establishing views, this doesn’t have a lot of room to grow and the characters – especially the vampires – are really 2-D. There are some nice blood moments but the wider story is kinda hobbled on with no real depth and no explanation as to any universe mechanics. Despite this the concept remains intriguing. The protagonists are played really well, with limited material to work with. We get a moment of vampiric possession (I think) and an awful cgi flock of bats. This isn’t the worst film out of the stable but an effort with the script and some more locations could have lifted it, for sure. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK (with a Full Moon subscription)

Sangue Misto – review

Director: Chiara Natalini (segment)

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

This is a film that Leila mentioned to me. It is a horror anthology set in Italy, each story being around a different city/region and each film focusing on a migrant person/community. It is a call for integration by absolutely othering the different cultures and a need for understanding – as per IMDb – but it might also be read in a more nationalistic sense given that it is the immigrant cultures/persons that are othered.

messaging

Possibly my favourite was very short and the first segment, Grandma's Remedy, which involved voudon and Baron Samedi. The vampire segment, Veneranda, was the very last segment and was, itself, rather short. So short in fact that the whole thing will be spoilt or there will be little to say.

getting ready

The opening shows a woman, from behind, getting ready at a dresser in a loft or warehouse type space, cut with various roadways in the city. We are then with three men, two in a car and one puking nearby. It is a stag party, the man puking is the groom and one of his friends videos and takes photos of him on their phone. Eventually there is a call for them to go on a “slut tour”.

streetwalker

This consists of driving through a red-light area. They pass many streetwalkers, who seem to be from the transexual community, before the groom tells them to stop by one particular prostitute. She seems momentarily reluctant, then agrees and gets in the car. They pull up at a building and this is clearly her space, containing the dresser from the beginning.

facing a vamp

She dances for the man and soon goes down on him as the friend films. However, he is soon screaming, and blood is everywhere. She comes up to reveal fangs and slaughters the men. She is revealed to be from Brazil. There isn’t much to say about this segment. It works, it has good atmosphere through the photography a fair amount of blood (though it fails to meet the levels in the section Rigorosamente dissanguati da vivi, which has a torture porn vibe). There isn’t really a massive narrative, however; the men may have been loud, drunk and obnoxious but they did not do anything that would make this seem anything more than slaughter and feeding. 5 out of 10 for the segment in and of itself but the film as a whole deserves more.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Handbook of the Vampire: Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and the World of Dreams

Written for Handbook of the Vampire by Gillian McIver the Chapter Page can be found here.

Dedicated to the wonderful film Vampyr the author takes us on a study of the film touching on its financing, Dreyer’s vision and some of the themes and imagery in the film itself.

One aspect that I particularly liked, as it is not something I picked up personally, was the observation that the predation of Chopin (the vampire) on Leone is actually age preying on youth. A marvellous observation. The book within the film, The Curious History of the Vampire, by Paul Bonnat, O.P. Published by Gottfried Faust’s Estate – 1770 AD, which we read much of during the running time on intertitles, was so central to the film that (in my original review of the film I quote it extensively). The author quotes Dreyer himself as seeing the book as a character itself. I liked the reading of the film as being a series of dreams belonging to Allan Grey.

The one thing I did find odd was that the author didn’t touch on the over-exposure of the film, which offers its distinctive look. Though this may be because that has been touched on many times before.

Honourable Mention: Deadpool & Wolverine

Some may call this 2024 Marvel film, directed by Shawn Levy, the film that saved the MCU – that remains to be seen. Drawing the ultra-popular Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, Blade Trinity) into the MCU along with the equally popular Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, Van Helsing) was always going to be a slam dunk, especially with the on and off-screen chemistry the two actors display. That is, so long as they managed to pitch the film right, and that they did with plenty of fan service, gags out the wazoo, fourth wall breaks and plenty of violent action.

Wesley Snipes as Blade

It was great seeing some of the old characters reappear from the Marvel stable and from outside the MCU sequence. For us, it was the re-emergence of Blade (Wesley Snipes) and let us not forget that it has been argued that the original Blade movie saved Marvel. Stuck in the Void, a multiverse trash heap where the Time Variance Authority stick multiverse problems (and old Marvel heroes from films not in the MCU are sent to die), Deadpool and Wolverine are found by a resistance group that includes Blade and they then help them fight the evil Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) to get the duo passage out of the Void.

the Void resistance

It was great to see Wesley Snipes reprise the role and even better to see him enjoying it – rather than phoning the performance in as he did in Blade Trinity. There is one thing that struck me, however. There was fan chatter when, in context of multiple character variants, he says “There's only been one Blade...and there's only ever gonna be one Blade.” Many took this as a hint that perhaps Snipes, rather than Mahershala Ali, may be Blade in the touted (but troubled) MCU Blade film. We shall see; though I doubt it at this point, I could be on board with that, though I am very excited to see Ali in the role. However, I do think Sticky Fingaz might have something to say about that and Blade the Series deserved far more love than it got.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK