Dracula 3000

[Fearless Freep]

Last night's entertainment was Dracaula 3000.  I use the term entertainment very loosly....

It's a bit hard to describe my reaction to it.  Usually I don't bother to think of movies as 'bad' or 'good' but simply 'did it keep me at least somewhat entertained for the running time'  I'm not sure if his one kept me enertained so much as just occupied.  It was bad in many ways; but it also contained two of my favorite movie subject matters Vampires and Sci-Fi) so I guess it did 'entertain' me in some was as a not too uncomfortable distraction from life in general

But..oh boy, was this a train wreck of a potential good idea executed totally ineptly at some many points along the way.

The story opens in space with a salvage ship and it's crew finding a larger cargo ship adrift in space, the Demeter, lost 50 years ago.  So the crew, with Casper Van Dien (as "Abraham Van Helsing" as the Captain,  of about five or so investigate the ship, hoping to get a payoff of turning it in.  On this ship they find 50 coffins in a room...and a dead crewmember tied to a chair holding a cross.  It seems something is still alive..or dead..or both...on the ship

Rather than describe the story much further, I'll just go into details about the many, many things wrong with the whole thing.  An itemmized list is easier than a narrative in this case.  Somtimes a movie is described as 'paint by numbers' and this is probably the worst example of that idea I've ever seen.  Not that the movie follows a formula.  Simply that there are cliches and idioms and references to other works that are thrown into the mix in a way that indicates that the writer/director had no idea why he was putting them in, just that he had to.  Like a child doing a paint-by-numbers picture who has not a clue about composition, line, shape, color, etc..but just puts things in because the instructions say to.  

 - Udo Kier - He plays the former captain of the Demeter.  His only appearnace is in video logs of his last days on the ship...going from bad to worse.  I've seen this done in other movies.  However, in thise case it's little more than exposition for the audience, as there is no indication that anyone from Van Helsing's crew ever sees these logs.  This seems to be done to raise suspense as the logs are shown interspersed with the rest of the story.  However, these segments really raise more problems for the movie as there is no evidence on the ship that everything he's saying actually happened...like either a bunch of dead bodies or a bunch of hungry vampires.

- Coolio - Coolio plays a cremember named 187 (I'm not explaining the name...would take too long).  He's the first cremember turned to a vampire and in the role ends up being burdened with some of  the worst dialog of the whole movie ("Your wish is my command"). Many of his lines became cliches a few decades ago and the rest are just silly.  He makes up for it by really throwing himself into that part, trying to make up with energetic enthusiasm and body movement what he seems to realize is a really stupid part to play.  This makes his scenes both annoying and embarassing.

- The Soviet's live - There is a lot of posters and such hanging on the walls that harken back to the Soviet Union, with no explanation as to why or what the political structure currently is or...whatnot.  Remember that this movie takes places a *thousand* years in the future.  Think of the political structure today versus a thousand years ago.   The presence of so much red hammer-and-sickle paraphenalia is too obvious to be an accident, and yet never figures into the plot in an way.  I don't know what the director was thinking with this

- Mother III - the name of Val Helsing's ship is "Mother III" which I can only assume is a nod to Mother, the computer in Alien, but...nothing is made of it so I guess call it a throwaway reference to a better movie

- I didn't know the size of the crew until they realize that their own ship, Mother III, had disconnected from the Demeter, leaving them all stranded, which helped establish the size of the crew, and that they are monumentally stupid for sending *everyone* onto the Demeter

- Racism - Coolio and Humvee.  Two black characters.  Again, a thousand years in the future and yet they use 1990s slang and play up black/white racial tensions.  Again this seems like something the writer thought should be in a horror movie but really has no context to hang on so it just sits there looking conspicious in it's anachronimity (like the Soviet/communism references)

- Again, the character's nickname is "Humvee" often shortened to "Hummer", a nice way-out-of-place bit of cultural reference.

- Bram Stoker(tm) - Starting with the name "Van Helsing", there are some references to the book Dracula:  The ship came from the "Transylvanian System" (or "Port" or "Planet"...it's nt consistant where it came from except it was from some place named 'Transylvania').  They are in the "Carpathian System" (or "Galaxy"..again somewhat inconsistant) .  A ship full of coffins full of sand.  Again, like many movies seem to want to throw in a nod back to the original source with the inclusion of a Van Helsing and maybe a Renfield (one reference not in the movie, oddly ) this one has these little bits, but since the characters really show no knowledge of 'Transylvania', 'Carpathia', etc...it doesn't really do much for the movie.  Now that I think about it, I think "Mina" was a character name in the book, which is repeated here.  I haven't read the book in awhile...there could've been others I missed.  So if you *know* the story of Dracula and about vampires then the names add some suspense or something, but none of the *characters* do, just the audience, which lessens the impact

- Van Helsing - they do try to tie Van Helsing back to the ancient character as a vampire hunter, but it doesn't matter.  Dracula says he's been waiting 1000 years for a chance for him to show up, which really works against the idea that basically Dracula is the last of his kind and wants to get to Earth to feed.  Pick a motivation for your villian and work with it...or at least have it fit together.  This is, again, an attempt to shoe-horn a cliche into a plot with no room for it.

 - The Demeter - in the old captain's flashbacks, there is indication that the ship has been basically taken over and the crew has no control over it motions.  Yet the crew of Mother II have no problem starting  the enine and getting he navigation working to head to earth...which is where Dracula wants to go anyway....so why has the ship been adrift for 50 years?

- Religion - apparently drugs have been legalized (which I think basically was an excuse to allow Coolio a lot of drug-use dialog without anyone wondering what in the world he was doing as part of the crew...just make his behavior legal)  but God, and religious artifacts, have been made illegal.  I think this must be, like the Soviet Union symbols, some poltical statement by the writer because it really doesn't make much sense in the movie.  It's referenced a few times but not as anything that sets the stage for anything else.  In a movie very short on it's own originality and enough story to drive a movie, you think they would avoid spending much time on stuff with no connection to that story anyway.  Or conversely, quit with the politico-socio-religious commentary and *focus* on the story at hand (then again, this was the first writing credit for one of the two writers whose credits are mostly 'boom operator' and 'sound mixer')

I could go on as bits and pieces of non-sensicalness go in and out of my brain as I remember this movie...but you get the idea.  Bad acting, worse dialog, an attempt to squeeze a Dracula movie intoa Sci-Fi context (which could be an *awesome* idea, but this one seemed to take about the worst of both genres and turn out something that is terrible at both)  I won't even get into Dracula's "Cheap Holloween Costume" outfit....  Nice spoiler on that cape...


 * spoiler! *
And the ending...dear Lord the ending.  This is probably the most glaring example of "we ran out of money, one final explosion and that's it"  This would be a great motivation of "film your ending first and then work from there so if your budget runs short you can cut scenes from the middle"  One minute, Erika Eliniak (as a woman first officer..wait she's really a robot narcotics police undercover...wait before that she was a pleasure bot) is coming on to the only other surviving human...the next we get fast camera flying down hallways and then an external shot as the ship...blows up...I guess it crashed into the twin suns they were steering toward (the brilliant idea being that they could get close to a bright sun system and that would kill Dracula...in a space ship with no windows)

[Andrew]

I gave a try at watching this one night when it was on Scifi.  Unfortunately, I caught it probably half way through and could not get into the groove.  I decided to give up and see the whole thing through.  Also, Scifi can tend to chop out some of the reasons I watch bad movies.

[Fearless Freep]

If you mean Erika Eleniak?  Ummm....well...there is no skin flashing and very little gore (the IMDB credits indicate it was inteneded for TV release), but on the other hand, some of the dialog is so explicit it seems it would be hard to show on TV unedited...

[plan9superfan]

The Sci-fi Channel is to TV Movies what Troma is to theatrical movies: the haven of awful b-movies.

[dean]

Sci FI being a haven or not, this movie was definitely a bad bad one.

Like Freep, I found the ending a bit, well, odd... I kind of expected something to happen!  Talk about your biggest anticlimax ever.

Another thing, they spend way to much time with pointless exposition!  I mean, so what if the crew don't know what or who God and religion is!!!  I would have thought by now that people would have more of a clue really...

Frustrated the hell out of me, this movie did!

[BoyScoutKevin]

Going back to references to the original "Dracula," in Bram Stoker's "Dracula," "Demeter" is the name of the ship in which Dracula traveled from Roumania to England. When the ship wrecks itself on the shore, all the crew is found to be missing, except for the captain, who has tied himself to the wheel of the ship, with a crucifix in front of him. The only thing else found on the ship is several coffins full of earth.

[Fearless Freep]

all the crew is found to be missing, except for the captain, who has tied himself to the wheel of the ship, with a crucifix in front of him.

I remember that.  That actually makes sense on a sailing ship that the captain would lash himself to the wheel. The way they translated it to the space ship didn't make much sense as to why he was tied down.  Again it's like the writers were pretty familiar with the book and copied a bunch of elements of it into space, but the result just didn't really make sense.