Director: Michael Stasko
Release date: 2024
Contains spoilers
With the best will in the world, this film drawn like a 1950s-B should score low, it really should. However, I sat amused as I watched this. Michael Stasko and his team aimed for something straight out of Ed Wood’s playbook and totally committed to it and that commitment paid off, this should be bad, or so bad it’s good, rather I think it is actually pretty darn good.
Drawn in Black and White it starts at the MacDowell tobacco farm and mom, Bernice (Catherine Valle) sings a lullaby as she and pa, Roy (Erik Helle), put daughters Mary (played young by Elizabeth Wacheski and older by Jessica Antovski) and Susan (played young by Lauren Meadows and older by Charlotte Bondy) to bed. Later in the night the family dog, out on the porch, starts barking. Susan goes to the window and sees it run off into the tobacco fields, she follows.
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| spattered in mom's gore |
Mary gets her parents and they look for her sister, who has been traumatised when she found the dog fed on by Dracula (Craig Gloster). In response Dracula causes his spaceship (yes, he’s a UFO flying Dracula) to blast Bernice, leaving Roy, along with the girls, spattered in her gore. Dracula turns his attention to the family but the spaceship fails and a reflection of light catching Roy’s cross causes the vampire to flee, turning into a bat.
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| Oliver Georgiou as Wayne |
Ten years later and, a now grown, Mary is walking to school, something is in the field by her but she is distracted when a car with some guys stop by her. The majority are being sexual to her – though there is a warning about her murderous father. It seems that the townsfolk believe Roy killed Bernice, though he was acquitted. No one believes about the UFO. One of the guys, Wayne (Oliver Georgiou), is pissed with the attitude of the others and makes them drive off. They don’t see the zombie come of the field and rip Mary’s throat out – or the others that then rip her to shreds. I say zombie but they have fangs…
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| stake |
Essentially, Dracula is going to invade Earth. His son, Dylan (Robert Kemeny) – a secret human-o-phile – created a serum that prevents their reaction to the cross (although these space vampires do not know it as a cross and refer to it as a t symbol). The side effect is that those bitten by a vaccinated vampire will turn, develop fangs but they (and their brains) rot. In other words, zombie vampires (or zompires, we would say). Like a vampire they must have the heart destroyed, not the rotting brain. There is, however, another apotropaic in the film, which the audience works out long before the characters – tobacco. It scares them off and makes vampire technology fritz out (hence the foul up at the beginning). It seems that it works fresh but tobacco smoke seems more effective.
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| the vampire high council |
So, there is a vampire high council – not impressed with Dracula’s efforts. Unnamed in film they are credited as Vampira (Judith O'Dea, Night of the Living Dead), Nosferatu (David Liebe Hart) and Coppola's Dracula (Martin Ouellette). There is a cracking mirror bit with Dylan dressed as a soldier with a massive fake beard and only being spotted through the mirror – and it’s a moment where we can see a reflection of clothes (and fake beard) but not the vampire. There is turning into bats, as mentioned, but at one point Dracula turns into a bat to get into a mini bat-winged UFO.
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| clothes reflect |
High silliness abounds with some genuine NSFW jokes - Lloyd Kaufman for instance appears as a character credited as town masturbator and his antics, when described, are consistently followed up with the line, “did he finish?” But the real reason this works is the absolute commitment to the aesthetic. The designs – be it the sci-fi elements or the fifties elements are bob on. There is no attempt to hide the wires. Because that fits the aesthetic. This was way more fun than I thought it would be. 6 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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