Dracula 2000

I've been a sucker for vampire movies ever since I first saw Bela Legosi don the cape and fangs in Dracula. Werewolves still top my monster list, but I'll usually give a vampire flick a try, too. When I saw the box for Dracula 2000 at the video store, I had two immediate thoughts. One, of course, was "mmmm, vampires." But right on the heels of that was "my, that looks like one big ball of suck." Seriously, look at the cover image there to the left, with it's slick, updated for the new millennium look. Combine that with a storyline of thieves steal Dracula's corpse from Van Helsing's secret vault. Much hilarity, involving Van Helsing's daughter, ensues. Definitely looks like barrel-scraping time to me. Stop! Spoiler Time!

Surprisingly enough, I actually enjoyed it. Yes, that plot description is pretty accurate. Yes, it makes everything sleek and streamlined and pretty the way a great many movies did updating old concepts around the turn of the millennium. Even Godzilla got a makeover. But it was rather fun to watch, and it had an origin concept for Dracula himself I hadn't heard before. What I liked was the places the movie went that I hadn't seen before. Dracula, as it turns out, is truly immortal. Van Helsing has been trying to find a way to kill him for over a century, and has also been shooting up with the vampire's blood to keep himself alive the whole time. He keeps Dracula locked in a silver coffin in his vault until the thieves manage to set him free, having vowed to stay alive and imprison the vampire until he finds a way to eliminate it. Better still was the eventual explanation of Dracula's origin. Van Helsing's daughter, who was apparently born infected with part of Dracula's life force, puts together the clues of his hatred of God, his issues with sunlight, and his allergy to silver and realizes Dracula is really Judas Iscariot. His punishment for his betrayal was that he wasn't allowed to die when he hung himself, and has walked the earth, feeding on the blood of the living ever since. I liked that idea, and it neatly tied together several bits of vampire lore.

The rest of the movie was pretty standard fare, and drew numerous parallels to other vampire movies. Much of it is set in New Orleans, as popularized by Interview with the Vampire. Dracula ties an airplane pilot to the steering wheel before crashing the plane, mimicking the wreck of the Demeter from the orignal novel, and scenes also point back to the Bela Lugosi film as well as the more recent Bram Stoker's Dracula. It wasn't great by any means, but it was a fun watch, and a lot better than I had expected. Easily worth a negative 0.1 Boll.

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