College Vampires

Yeah, sure...horror comedies are nothing new but usually they tend to have at least some elements from both genres. Transylmania is obviously not trying to be a horror movie, but it's not really a comedy, either. Sure, it tries, but it probably won't get more than a few chuckles out of you. That's what I don't get here. If you're making a horror themed comedy then you've got a ton of things to work with. This film just kind of falls on it's face at almost every opportunity. It feels like a bad mash up of all the worst aspects of a National Lampoon movie mixed with the eye-rolling stupidity of some of the more unsuccessful modern teen sex comedies. Simply put, it's just stupid...and not in a good way.

This is supposed to be a comedy, but they telegraph the "jokes" a mile off...

A group of college students are lured to a university in Transylvania, where they tangle with a cult of vampires, a sexy vampire hunter, a mad doctor (who happens to be a little person) who is trying to find a new body for his hunchback daughter.

We get a bunch of tired gags, monsters that aren't very scary, and characters (way too many of them) we just don't give a flip about. Was there a point here?

There are a lot of gratuitous nude scenes with a lot of the actresses. That's a plus. Not much of one, and maybe it was the excuse as to why the movie was made.

Yea. Yea. Yea. This is not everyone's cup of Joe but there is redeeming quality here. The actors are committed to the far-out gags, characters and the well laid out storyline. No one is winning awards and I don't care.

I wanted to laugh at some silliness in the vampire genre and that's what this is -- that's all. A splash of ta-tas, nice sword fighting, babe in leather (who should have her own TV show) and the look-a-like mistaken identify angle which is always worth a laugh or two.

The mad scientist/Dean sub-plot fit perfectly into a main story that went balls-out for comic bits, some worked, some didn't. So what? Pop some corn, kick back and laugh at the broad but consistent spoof before you.

Cheers!

I don't really care for many comedies. "American Pie," "There's Something About Mary," and similar films simply don't appeal to me. I just don't find them funny.

Now, this is not to say that "Transylmania" was funny. It never made me laugh. But it WAS more entertaining and less frustrating than most comedies. The Hillenbrand brothers at least managed to keep the pace up through most of the movie. And they cheerfully steal from (er...pay homage to, I guess) numerous other films.

The sets and locations are decent, the animated title sequence is a bit more imaginative than following one of the characters around campus (as most films do), and you can actually see and hear what's going on.

The major puzzle is why it's as tame as it is. I watched the "unrated' version, which is basically a mild R-rating. The little violence and nudity is pretty comical, though the language can be a bit strong. The relative lack of nudity was also surprising. None of the extra-busty (or buff, take your pick) leads ever peeled down. And only a few of the extraneous characters ever got nekkid. Now, this isn't essential to a film like this, but it's pretty much the norm. Plus, if you're shooting in Romania, you're going to find lots of attractive actors there who are anxious to make a splash. I'm just surprised, is all.

OK for people with nothing better to do.

Transylmania (1:35, R) — Other: Comedy, 3rd string, original, OSIT chauvinists

When you're shooting for stupidly outrageous, it's really, really easy to slip off the tracks and end up as outrageously stupid. That's what happened to the parody Stan Helsing, for example. And that was a movie that featured at least a few actors that you'd heard of before and a character who was supposed to be a descendant of Dracula's Abraham Van Helsing. Transylmania features nobody you've ever heard of before, and one of its characters is a descendant of vampire hunter Victor Van Sloan, equally unknown to history prior to today.

Nonetheless, Transylmania works on its own terms. It follows 10 American college students, every one of them a flaming stereotype, as they arrive for a semester abroad in Romania, specifically Transylvania (where the movie was actually shot), explicitly at Razvan University, whose campus is in historic Castle Razvan, which 500 years ago was the home of famed vampire Count Radu. Rumor has it that the count is immortal, a hypothesis quickly confirmed as we find him roaming the corridors. Rusty, the student who opens the film as our narrator, is a dead ringer for the count, made more so when (by sheer coincidence) he dresses up for the freshman welcome ball in exactly the same outfit that Radu habitually wears.

Also among the American students are a couple of stoner lads who discover their blue jeans are a local gold mine; twin sisters, Lia the goody-goody and Danni the try-anything good- time gal; Newmar, the inept football player; Lynne, the nymphomaniac airhead cheerleader who has the hots for him; and Cliff, the oaf who figures the way to impress women is by claiming to be a vampire hunter. He uses this line on Prof. Teodora Van Sloan (the aforementioned descendant of Victor), and she takes him with the same deadly seriousness with which she approaches vampire hunting in general. With lips, vocal tone, and swordplay, she evokes Catherine Zeta-Jones in Zorro.* (In the only college class we actually see on screen, she demos self-defense techniques involving decapitation and a stake thru the heart. In response to a question she says "Vampires? Don't be silly. Now let's talk about what to do if someone jumps at you from out of a coffin." The rest of the movie is much like this.)

The mcguffin is a music box containing the soul of Radu's true love, the sorceress Stephanie, entrapped there by Victor. It was lost half a millennium ago but has recently been rediscovered. It falls into Lynne's hands. Every time she opens it, she's possessed by Stephanie; then, when it's closed, she reverts, wondering what happened.

There's much more. Dean Floca, the dwarf with a dungeon. His dotter Draguta, totally babeulicious chatting with Rusty via videocam but sporting a hideous hunchback in real life. Better than the Kama Sutra, the Codex Eroticon, which "can blow a chick's mind". The machine that keeps disembodied heads alive. The tall, gawky student who once kissed another guy while drunk and can't live it down. The horses with the odd reaction to the word "Razvan". Much of this is throwaway stuff, but a lot of it actually advances the plot.

Really, the story is way more complex that you'd ever expect for something played as broadly as this — and it's played VERY broadly — but it all hangs together. Not a millisecond of it can be taken even remotely seriously, of course, but the audience is all in on the joke, and the writers (Patrick Casey and Joshua "Worm" Miller) and directors (David and Scott Hillenbrand) make it work.

Objectively, this is a terrible movie. But subjectively, I got a real bang out of it. Of course, I happen to be partial to breasts the size of canteloupes, of which there's an abundance, and that helped. And I kept laffing out loud because I kept thinking "Wow, are they really trying to be THAT outrageous? Yeah, I guess they are."

So I give it a 5. This is higher than where I've pegged Fantastic Mr. Fox (3) and 2012 (4) and a coin-flip with that other vampire movie in town. Does that mean that I'd rather see Transylmania than those others? Yes. Yes, I would. Heaven help me, yes, I would. YMMV. No guarantees.

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*I don't recall that Catherine ever went in for the tight-black-leather look, but from now on I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head.