Dracula 3000 (2005)

12th Nov 05





Plot
A bunch of wannabe and has-been actors meet a camp Dracula on a space frigate in the future. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.

Review
The are many ways to describe travesties of justice, and there are many ways to point the blame for a bad movie. Some people point at the director, some the actors, some the budget. Sometimes, the reason why a movie is bad is actually all three. Have you ever seen a movie that's so bad it's got bad acting, bad directing, no budget and a plot and script that defies all faith in human intelligence? No, I'm not talking about Pearl Harbor, and neither am I talking about anything by Bruno Mattei. I'm talking about Dracula 3000, which is perhaps one of the worst B-movie sci-fi horror movies I've ever seen.

Casper Van Dien plays Captain Van Helsing of some deep space salvage ship, which comes across and derelict cargo transporter in the – get this - Carpathian system. They board the vessel and find a strange ship's log starring an old Udo Kier (go see Flesh for Frankenstein for a young Udo) who tells of how his ship has been taken over by a strange virus. The crew have locked themselves in their quarters (to escape 'the madness') but when our adventurers go looking they find no one, although they do find a small hangar filled with very ornate looking wooden coffins. Can you see where this is going? Yes, to cut a long story short, Dracula is in one of the coffins, he escapes, turns a couple of the group into vampires and hunts down the rest one-by-one. At least that's what he tries to do, although for all his powers those space airlock doors appear to have the better of him; I'm referring here to the God damned awful ending. Oh my...

The cast do a bad job at trying to salvage a bad script. Casper Van Dien is as wooden as he was in Starship Troopers, but this time he doesn't have mega-budget action to fall back on. Erika Eleniak is still sexy I suppose, although she's a little chunkier than that amazingly breasted siren that climbed out of that cake in Under Siege. Tiny Lister is the same old Tiny Lister (he's the black guy with the crossed eyes from the prison sequence in Goldmember), and Coolio plays a mad dope head moron. Make of that what you will, but his turn as a vampire is so embarrassing that it would make even Bela Lugosi turn in his grave.

In fact, the only actor on the planet who could portray a vampire on a space ship less convincingly than Coolio is the guy they hired to play Dracula. Do you remember the incredibly camp Count Dracula at the beginning of Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires? Yes, he's that bad; and to make matters worse he looks like he's just walked in off the set from that movie. No moving with the times, no contemporary styles a thousand years in to the future, oh no. Rubbish.

So, absolutely nothing to recommend about this film? No, although look at it this way; if this were twenty years older it might be hailed as a good bad classic and might even have made it into the recent Alien Gore Sci-Fi night at Zombie Club. But it's not, so it didn't. And that's about all I've got to say about that.

Versions
Available on Anchor Bay DVD.

Posted by
Jim



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