In one of my many mass box lot of DVD's purchases I've made I got this movie about a year or two ago. The cover art was just not that eye catching so it went into the "I'll watch it one of these days." pile. Well last night I decided to watch it and I was surprised, aside from the title and cover art being very misleading it was good. After all it shows a vampire on the cover and has Dracula in the title, what would you think? So I'm thinking it's a vampire flick which I tend to watch in the fall, well wrong it was more of a biopic of Vlad III the Impaler with a lot, and I mean a lot of liberties taken with the true story. It was made for TV in 2000, but I'd never heard of it, and as long as you toss historical accuracy out the window it was an entertaining movie. Historically speaking it was full of errors, as far as the actual Vlad the Impaler goes, there was some truths there, albeit not many.
(Spoilers ahead)
One glaring error was that Vlad was killed by his brother, Radu which in reality died 2 years before Vlad did in real life, while history has a few different stories of his death most are that he died in battle or was killed by his own men after they grew tired of his increasing cruelty. Another error was he had the boyar's (feudal leaders) killed at a dinner party which again is wrong, however it's easy to over look though some of these errors. After all it's a movie not a history lesson, right?
(END SPOILERS)
All in all it was well made for a TV movie and worth more than one viewing and aside from the very misleading title and cover art and glaring historical errors, it's worth a look.
I give it 3 out of 5
SIDE NOTE: that's one of my pet peeves is that if you are going to portray an actual person, make some effort to get it as historically accurate as you can and still maintain a good movie, otherwise don't use the real persons name. Sure some license needs to be taken, but damn know when to say when.
