The Month of Terror: Dracula II: Ascension (2003)

My only explanation for this movie is that the people who made Dracula 2000 looked at their movie and said, “Hey, this isn’t near nonsensical, stupid and silly enough yet! Let’s see what we can do about that!” And thus THIS.

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Jason London

Website: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=dracula+II

Really, I’m at a loss for words. Dracula II, the movie that even Gerard Butler was too good for, is just a spectacle of horrible characters, ridiculous story elements that come out of nowhere and a lack of any logic. It’s a movie that would crumble at the first sign of any kind of logic. Does that sound good to you? I’d rather be eaten by a WALRUS than watch this garbage again so you know it’s going to be an interesting ride…

We start off with a lady in the Czech Republic doing one of her nightly ‘run around in a fancy white gown for no reason’ sessions. She’s getting chased around by the master of walking slowly, this Bruce Lee rip-off!

Doo dee doo...just taking a stroll out here; not like running would get my goal accomplished faster or anything! Pfft. Jogging is for losers!

No, really, he’s a Bruce Lee rip-off. Sounds like a stirring resume to me, too; stick him in the movie for the rest of the runtime!

So it turns out she’s a vampire and also has a clone of herself, and they both bite him a little before he kills them, thus setting up the central conflict for this oh-so-endearing and deep character…yeah, not really; we just switch to a scene with this cripple named Lowell giving the shortest speech ever delivered in a college classroom about how death is inevitable. I guess he’s famous for 5-second speeches…

Then we get some more amazing character development as our heroes, among them a chick named Elizabeth, who is dating Lowell the crazy cripple man, a black guy named Kenny and his girlfriend, Not-Paris-Hilton. She probably has another name but that’s all I’m calling her.

Yeah I buy this about as much as I buy...well, any other obvious chick only with a guy for his money.

After that we see Elizabeth working at the hospital with this guy Luke, played by Jason London. I don’t really have a joke about him, but rest assured, he’s a terrible actor, and five minutes into this performance and you’ll want to shoot him. They’re concerned because a body came in, burnt and scarred to all hell after being hung from a cross at dawn. His organs are white, and even though there are plenty of other explanations, Luke says he thinks it’s a vampire. At first it seems like he’s joking, but no; he really thinks it’s a vampire right off the bat. Was he just waiting for some opportunity to spout out the most ludicrous conclusion he could think of? It’s like some dumbass kid in elementary school who just talked for the sake of talking. This movie’s dialogue is on the level of annoying kids prying for attention. I’ll let that sink in for a second…aaaaand done.

So while in the real world this would have been met with derision and scorn from all parties, luckily Luke has found the dumbest person in existence with Elizabeth, as she just eats it up and goes along with it. She gets bitten by accident and doesn’t tell anyone, probably because she’s an idiot. Then Luke gets a phone call from a “mysterious third party” offering them a lot of money for the body. Lowell for some reason, can’t imagine why, says it’s a good idea that they take it. Can’t possibly be that he wants to heal his crippled body, can it? Nah. Luke freaks out and gets Elizabeth to help move the body in secret, because that’s really legal, right as the slow-walking priest/Bruce Lee rip-off comes and tries to find it.

If this jackass walked any slower he'd be going backwards. Christ.

And seriously, how does this guy arrive on time for anything? He walks SO DAMN SLOW. It’s just nuts. He’s worse than Michael Myers and Jason combined. All the other characters are doing stuff and running around like mad, and this guy is just kind of walking around slowly, like he doesn’t even know where he’s going. Kind of hard to take that very seriously…

Meanwhile, Luke, Elizabeth, Kenny and Not-Paris-Hilton are transporting the body to Lowell’s parents’ old house, which is big and gothic-like. Like any sane person would do, they put the body in a bathtub of blood and expect it to come back to life. Is this sounding like your last really screwed up house party in college yet?

Not-Paris-Hilton's real line here is "Maybe it needs to be virgin blood?" God,  the way these people think scares me.

So yeah it eventually DOES come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary that it would probably just be an insane pot-fueled idea that even Jay and Silent Bob would blush at, and we get the ensuing garble of incoherent scenes:

Nope, sorry; not buying her falling out the window like that. She was barely even shoved at all. Did the floors just get polished with grease beforehand?

Looks like they're trying to give Grandpa a bath again...it never works out the way it's supposed to, dammit!

Take THAT bathtub!

Oh and then this guy shows up! Who is he? I don’t know. He says he’s the money!

Oh yeah, well...I'm the ATM.

Pardon my French but WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? And I don’t just mean this action scene; I mean the ENTIRE GODDAMN MOVIE UP UNTIL THIS POINT. It’s like they just threw out ten pages of the script explaining this spastic gibberish and just left us to pick up the pieces! How did they know what to do with the vampire? Did they really just have all these specific rituals waiting for the very, very specific off-chance they could bag a vampire? For that matter, why would they just jump to the conclusion that the dead body they found was a vampire? Remember, this takes place only a few hours after the first movie ended. Vampires were, as far as the viewer has been led up to this point, not a common phenomenon. It makes about as much sense as a character randomly deciding she fully, seriously believes in Bigfoot; you might as well just make that into a movie next.

Not to mention the whole subplot with Christopher Plummer’s daughter becoming a vampire hunter or whatever. Where did that go? It’s completely ignored now. What’s the logic with this? Did the writers just decide they didn’t like their own movie? What? WHAT?

After that they move Dracula to another location where they all start doing experiments on him, draining his blood only to find out he’s severely dehydrated and is running out.

This was actually how the new movie 'The Debt' was supposed to turn out. But the filmmakers quickly decided it was such a stupid idea, they sent it back to the past apparently, and that's why we now have this pile of heinous vampire-droppings here.

Wait a second, didn’t Christopher Plummer in the first movie drain Dracula’s blood for YEARS even though Dracula was all but mummified? And now like an hour of burning in the sunlight and he’s suddenly drained entirely? WHAT SENSE DOES THAT MAKE. This is seriously mind-numbing. What other contradictions are they going to throw at us? Let’s just get them all over with now.

Okay, so there’s this one part where a priest played bafflingly by Roy Scheider from Jaws (what a career downgrade!) tells him that Dracula has to be forgiven by God, although in the other movie it was the exact other way around…ahh, continuity errors, what a surprise from this movie. You can’t see my face right now, but it’s forever in a mask of stoic unimpressed-ness while watching this.

Now that that’s over with, we can get onto more important things like watching Kenny inject the vampire blood into himself even though a) he was never shown to be a power-hungry or mean-spirited character before this and b) it turns him evil automatically, which never happened in the other movie…OK, OK, done ranting about continuity errors; both of these movies suck anyway. He goes out and mugs at the camera a lot:

Save it for the Fright Night remake...

…and then bags himself his first vampire whore!

Just to add 15 minutes of runtime to the movie, I suppose...

Some more stuff happens, and we find out that the vampire chick killed her own cat. Well now that this movie has animal violence I just can’t stand behind it anymore. I declare that this movie now officially sucks!

So she gets killed and then Kenny gets killed too…ah just play it:

After that? Time for some good old hallucinations! Although this time they’re more like rejected Twilight scenes rather than Tim Burton rip-offs. At least director Patrick Lussier is experimenting more! We also hear Dracula’s stunning monologue skills as he lists off all of his various names: Nosferatu, Judas, Vlad Tepes, El Hazarid, and other stuff that I'm sure they spent a lot of time on Wikipedia looking up.

Peter Griffin, George Carlin, Snoopy, Bill Cosby, Ozzy Osbourne...

It’s revealed then that Lowell was fooling them the whole time into thinking there was a third party who wanted Dracula when really it was just him wanting to heal his crippled body…I don’t even get this subplot; what difference does that deception make, anyway? We’re supposed to be surprised that the cripple who’s been ordering everyone around the entire movie and has the most direct, clear-as-day motive for experimenting with unusual medical practices, actually wants Dracula for himself? I thought that was just a given. But I guess that means I don’t have the intellectual prowess necessary to enjoy this masterpiece. So for the rest of the review I will now be praising this film.

No real reason for posting this except that it's yet another Funny Face in a Horror Movie.

We see the movie’s undying devotion to bloodcurdling terror as Dracula slaughters Lowell and that weird British guy, even ripping off the latter’s face whole! But it’s OK, as he comes back as a vampire somehow despite that. I’d say the following image is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life, but that wouldn’t even come close to doing it justice. In fact, it’s downright poetic:

.............well I think that speaks for itself.

Isn’t that just a peachy image? And what’s this – they’re defeating him by shoving a water bottle of holy water through his facial opening? How inventively creative and fresh! And I don’t just mean fresh as in, it was incredibly fresh water either!

That ought to be in a Zephyrhills ad or something. "Zephyrhills Crystal Clear water! It kills mutated and deformed vampires!"

Then we get some truly awesome battle scenes between Dracula and the slow-walking priest, who finally caught up to the movie I guess, but it’s OK since they were just building suspense. It doesn’t matter that it was completely silly – I was just missing the point before. We get some stock footage from the first movie and somehow that really pisses the slow-walking priest off, perhaps because he never liked the first film either. Clearly this one is superior in every way.

So yeah, all in all, I liked Dracula II. The characters were wonderfully colored, the storyline was only confusing if you’re an idiot who needs everything spelled out for you and the acting was unparalleled. So all in all, if you didn’t like this movie, you clearly have no idea about anything good in cinema. After all, if a guy with no face with a water bottle stuck in his head isn’t art, WHAT IS?

…now that I think about it, this was a pretty dumb movie after all.

The Month of Terror: Dracula 2000 (2000)

Amazing, a movie that actually manages to screw up the Dracula story even more than the 1991 version with that ridiculous Gary Oldman costume. I didn’t even think that was possible. Yes, Dracula 2000, brought to you by the genius minds that brought you sequels to White Noise, Pulse, Children of the Corn and Hollow Man, is another gem of a movie that you just can’t describe in a short review…so I made a really long one again, happy?

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219653/

"Don't ever fuck with an antiques dealer!"

-Jordan Chase

Our movie begins quite beautifully with scenes of London in the 1800s, with a bunch of dead people on a ship. I’d say these scenes had a point, but really I just think the director wanted to take a vacation to London, as we flash forward unceremoniously to the present day, without any kind of transition. Then we see Christopher Plummer and Jordan Chase from Dexter talking about some stuff in a room. Chase proceeds to flirt with the token attractive woman in this unnamed and vague company, who turns him down like a bad grade on a math test. Burned, Chase! Burned!

Then we see that this attractive woman is actually a part of some gang of robbers planning to break in and steal stuff. They find a secret passageway, a dungeon full of skulls and smoke and a big coffin, and, being idiots of the highest order, think that Plummer decorated the place like that to scare off thieves:

Looks like a rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayer set.

Come to think of it, why did Plummer decorate the secret passageway like that anyway? He’s clearly keeping the Dracula-coffin down there to keep it safe, so what’s the logic in decorating the place like a cheap haunted house? Why go through the trouble of putting up all those skulls and everything when he could have just put it in a room and locked the door? Not like anyone would see it if he was just using it to keep the thing in. I guess he’s just got a flair for the most ridiculous and over the top drama.

So yeah, the robbers activate a bunch of traps that were rejected from Indiana Jones 17 and a couple of them get killed off and impaled on stuff, which shocks the surviving robbers about as much as getting a letter in the mail. They just kind of shrug it off, take the coffin and go. This gets Plummer and Jordan Chase mad, as you can clearly tell by the way they scream every other line as if they’re in a terrible soap opera. Because that makes it dramatic! About as dramatic as a bunch of kids fighting on a schoolyard anyway…

We also get introduced to Mary, who has dreams apparently directed by Rob Zombie, although I would also accept ‘dreams directed by Tim Burton’ if you please:

Stop tormenting me, strobe lights and quick cuts!

She lives with her friend Lucy, they talk about boys (because that’s all girls ever do when they’re alone, you know), and that’s pretty much it. BACK TO THE ROBBERS!

They’re on a plane transporting the coffin back to wherever the hell they came from, and they all pick on this one guy for no reason except that he’s white and has a dorky Jew-fro style haircut that just begs to be made fun of. He opens the coffin after whining and complaining to himself, and is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of pot-smoke that I think was used by the writers to create the script!

Look at that hair; it's practically its own meme.

Actually it’s Dracula, played by Gerard Butler. He then proceeds to hide and wait for more idiots to come out. Which they do, leading to several long, drawn out minutes of those terrible ‘stop kidding around man!’ scenes you get in every terrible horror movie. Joy. But then using his incredible 'appearing ominously in doorways' power (which is pretty much all he does throughout this movie), Dracula turns everyone into vampires and crashes the plane.

But the wonders don’t end there, as then we get one of the strangest hallucination scenes ever as Dracula and Mary see each other through the door of the plane somehow? But one side of the door is the cockpit of the plane, and the other side is her room…and then he goes into her room, and attacks her until Lucy walks through him like a ghost? It’s hard to describe, but that’s because it’s just visually confusing as hell! I get what they were going for, but seriously, what kind of insane brain-cobble produced this anyway?

Well, I guess David Lynch was called on set to direct a scene after all...

After that, we get the BEST NEWSCASTER EVER as she wears a skimpy dress and talks incredibly dramatically about the robbers’ plane, which crashed in a lake. I mean really, saying things like ‘this is a lake of death and doom today’ is just silly. And I love how the camera-man is drooling over her the whole damn time. “I’m just recording this for my own jerk-off sessions later tonight, thanks!” But then Dracula just kills them, although even THAT is rendered incredibly silly by the fact that you see it through the camera so you can’t actually see him doing it:

"And tonight on National Enquirer News, we have a newscaster who they probably picked up from a brothel down on the bad side of town..." 

"...and flying men propelled by their own farts (that are actually vampires killing them; but that's just a conspiracy theory)!"

So then we get some exposition from Plummer on why Dracula is so evil: he hates Christianity. Yup, that’s it; just like any common acne-ridden 14 year old internet troll! Dracula’s just angsty! Oh, and apparently Christopher Plummer is actually the real Van Helsing, who kept himself alive by injecting himself with Dracula’s blood over the years just to make sure he doesn’t get out of his prison. And while doing THAT, he apparently also had time to father a daughter! And that daughter was Mary! See? It all makes sense now…except it really, really doesn’t. Let’s take a closer look at this ridiculous subplot:

First of all, how did he know that Dracula’s blood would give him any kind of special powers anyway? He’s counting on them to let him live forever, but how can he possibly tell that would work without some kind of problem occurring? Second of all, how did he know he wouldn’t run out sometime in the 100 years since he killed Dracula? What would’ve happened if he came in one day and tried to drain the blood but found out there wasn’t enough? “Whoops, my bad! Guess I should have just left it to my descendants or something, like any other sane person would have!” Third of all, he really had time to father a daughter? So much for devotion to the cause. You’d THINK a guy smart enough to figure out a way to live forever would be smart enough NOT to have sex with someone with that demonic blood in his veins! But I guess stupidity is necessary to move the plot forward!

Also I really like the Michael Jackson dance moves the hot vampire chick does in the science lab where she’s being held:

You could have at least put in "Thriller" or "Smooth Criminal" at this point...might have made the movie better...

And then we get another fight scene with some of Dracula’s goons, full of Matrix-style wire-jumping, terrible one-liners and implausible set-ups…and where are they supposed to be, anyway? Could they just not afford a real morgue, and so they had to film in a high school auditorium-slash-gymnasium?

After that, we see Dracula approaching Lucy at the video store where I’m sure they have much better movies than this one available. She decides to take him home, because I guess the creepy guy in the black trench coat who approached her in the video store is a good enough catch for her standards, and surprise surprise, he kills her soon after. Mary discovers that Lucy went off with some guy, and, jumping to the most bizarre conclusion possible, she of course automatically suspects that it’s Dracula at work. Because a hot blonde girl like this:

…couldn’t POSSIBLY have gotten a date otherwise, right?

Christopher Plummer goes to Mary’s house too and gets killed off easily by Dracula. So much for the great Van Helsing, right? Ho hum. So then we see some more of those wonderful schizophrenic editing in the Rob Zombie style as Mary returns and starts seeing things in the house. She fights some of Dracula’s posse, including the news-lady for some reason, and then runs away only to find Jordan Chase outside! They run away and go to a church, because…I guess the director felt like he hadn’t ripped off The Crow enough with all the shots of Gerard Butler wearing black perched on top of roofs, and had to compensate for his own insecurities.

Through more fight scenes that not even 4^th graders who like The Matrix would find endearing and lines so stupid that I’m surprised the actors willingly said them, the movie pretty much gets nowhere. However, there is one line so over the top and so silly that it actually makes the movie worth it…for a few seconds, anyhow. It’s when Jordan Chase is fighting off the vampire chicks. He beats them down and then screams “DON’T EVER FUCK WITH AN ANTIQUES DEALER!” at the top of his lungs, like some kind of battle cry. Yes. I believe we have a new indictment into the hall of absolute AWESOMENESS. No other line in this movie touches this level of over the top cheese.

But yeah, after that it pretty much produces nothing of worth, and I’m almost positive the writers ran out of ideas after that too, because the movie can’t even hold my interest for two seconds anymore. Jordan Chase chases the vamp-chicks around and Mary is kidnapped by Dracula and blah blah blah. They fight on the roof until it’s revealed that…DUN DUN DUN

Somebody call Mel Gibson, I think we have a new movie idea: Dracula and Jesus Christ!

No. No, you can’t be doing this, movie. You seriously can’t!

No, what are you thinking, movie? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Dracula is Judas? What? Why? What was wrong with the original story so much that you had to add this religious crap into it? It makes zero sense at all and just turns the whole thing into an even bigger joke. This isn’t Dogma or some nonsense where you can just make stuff like that up! At least in that movie it was played for comedy and satire. Here’s it’s supposed to be serious! Ugh. Let’s just finish the damn review.

So Dracula turns Mary into a vampire and tells her to bite Jordan Chase, but in a VERY SURPRISING TWIST she fakes it – didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s only been used in EVERY OTHER MOVIE EVER MADE after all! Then he throws her off the building but she wraps some wire around his neck before she falls…and wait a minute, wouldn’t the fall barely hurt her anyway? I mean it’s been shown in this movie itself that vampires are almost invincible, so…what? Dracula burns up, Mary turns back into a human somehow, becomes a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rip-off and then we mercifully get the credits!

Phew. So in case you couldn’t tell…this was stupid as hell. It made as much sense as the ramblings of a fever-ridden fourth grader on a sugar high, the acting AND writing was terribly over-done and over-dramatic, the story was a pile of clichéd horse crap and the characters weren’t very interesting. I will say it was at least entertaining, but it was entertaining in spite of itself rather than for any actual merit. And that’s never the way to go.

So are you guys ready for the sequel?!?!? I am!