Die Hard Dracula

Bought this movie at a 2nd hand store for a $1, so i wasn't expecting too much. But i have to tell you, it was hilarious!!! Why would you be expecting an Oscar winner with a title like this? Come on don't be so serious! The best part was the villagers with the changing accents. "Let's get torches & pitchforks" & then the father more concerned about his daughter being in bed with the guy than her being carried off by the Dracula. The other part everyone enjoyed was the flying coffin with the song of the Valkyrie's for a theme. "The only way to travel" hahaha!!!We watched it with a group of people and maybe that made it better as we had our own running commentary. Would we watch it again.. oh yeah!

Wow! This is like the opposite of good cinema. The camera-work looks just awful, the acting is some of the worst ever seen on screen, and the script is full of clichéd lines, bad puns and characters who don't deserve to be alive. This is quite probably the worst vampire movie ever made!

The film starts off with a weird history of vampires which felt like a bad History channel special. Then we move to the plot that Steven, a teenage boy, has just lost his girlfriend in a jet ski accident, so he travels to Rome for some odd reason. He ends up meeting up with Dr. Van Helsing to kill Dracula who has been sucking the local girls' blood. This is a very flat movie, but it may seem 4-D because it will suck the life right out of you.

Dracula is a bizarre character here. He is played by many different actors. He ranges from normal looking, to looking like a lion or something, to being morbidly obese. And he will change scene by scene. Maybe this was explained somewhere in the movie, but I've now watched this a miserable three times, and not caught it once. To go with Dracula's changing appearance, someone other than the actors provide his voice, and he sounds horrible. Dracula sounds like a bad video game character, only much worse recorded.

The special effects...oh goodness are they special. They include the superimposing of a coffin to a castle overhead shot to appear as the coffin is floating. And in one great scene Dracula throws burning balls at the main characters, which is another spectacular effect. Industrial Lights and Magic should learn something from this masterpiece.

The acting...AUGH!!! Just because a movie is low budget doesn't mean they have to get bad actors, but this was the worst. It's like the director intentionally picked people who couldn't act. There was not a decent acting job in the entire movie, which is somewhat comedic, but also intolerable after a while.

This is a horrible movie. The worst vampire flick. Never will a movie be this bad again, unless a sequel is produced, written and directed by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg.

My rating: BOMB out of ****. 90 mins. Not rated

I am honestly surprised at how low a rating this movie has received here. I've seen far worse movies, that have much higher ratings. Don't get me wrong, this is not a good movie, or even a "so bad it's good" movie ( such as "Autumn" (2009) ).

The thing that strikes me as the biggest single issue, is lack of creativity. Every possible chance the director had to suck the life out of this movie, he went for.

Here is a list of some of the issues I had with this little train wreck:

The editing. Many scenes were cut short, most notably the dinner scene. Many more seemed like there was some footage missing. The editing department was not very kind to scene transitions.

The script had to be written by a 12 year old. No adult could have come up with a storyline like this, unless he was very intoxicated.

The twist ending .... What?! Why?! How The?!

The acting. The folks who were in this were trying there best to act, but it is apparent they are not actors.

Sound was OK for the most part, except for certain scenes like the hayloft were noise obscured dialog.

All the central "good" characters were always in the same room.

Character's behavior "out of character" ( to put it mildly ).

Character interactions were very wrong.

Dracula - the whole character was wrong.

Dark blue day-for-night shots.

Plot points brought up, and dropped.

What little set design there were, looked more at home at a high school play, than this movie.

Special effects were so cheap, the movie would have been slightly better without them.

Of all these bad things I have said about this movie, there is 1 good thing I can say. It had some pretty good footage of the Sedlec Ossuary .

I don't know what to say, I am completely nonplussed. The description for this film makes it seem like it would, if not good, at least be funny. I was completely unprepared for what it turned out to be.

Firstly, there is an issue with the quality of the film. The picture is grainy and blurry, the camera-work is shake, there is lots of background noise in the sound and the special effects look like slide transitions in Powerpoint.

Secondly, the acting is atrocious, so wooden, so stiff, so sub par that you need a submarine to go lower. That they use multiple actors to play Dracula doesn't help either.

Thirdly, the story itself is really bad, like it was conjured up in a coffee break or something cause it feels really badly put together, bad stereotypes replacing characters, and a lot of failed attempts at witty dialog replacing action.

When they finally go up against Dracula with an arsenal of weapons, it is rather funny, but the silliness, bad acting, and shoddy quality takes away the fun. Not to mention, far too much time is spent talking about attacking Dracula as opposed to actually doing it.

Strangely, I did not find this movie as annoying, or as aggravating as I should have given the circumstances.

Is there a point where a movie goes beyond campy to just plain dumb? I didn't think so - but Die Hard Dracula is pushing the envelope way into the realm of stupid. It has plenty of camp which I was expecting - the music score was inspired with only 3 songs Ride of the Valkyries, Blue Danube, and some obscure 70's wakka wakka music. And the effects from blue screening the main character over a CNN documentary of Romania, to the magic chest of gold with it's own internal lighting (if you close the top does it shut off like a fridge), to the rubber mouse being pulled across the floor for ambiance, there is plenty to entertain anyone who loves trashing movies.

But I do not think anybody in the production of the movie took it seriously, they set out to make trash from the beginning. You have to try to be this bad. The dialog drones on like the computer who reads weather warnings, the plot was just thrown together as the movie went along, and the cheesy mother/father dialogue should have been delivered to a child of 8 not 18 going on 43. They couldn't even find a stone building to film the interior scenes in - instead they found some Black and White cow wallpaper and "made do".

But what I think really turned me off to this movie is that I felt they tried too hard to be "bad in the good way" and ruined the whole fun of ridiculing the movie. It kind of felt like teasing the class clown... you get no pleasure from it and he gets the attention he wants.

Thanks a lot for ruining my fun guys... This movie had lots of potential for all time camp, but no, you had to try to be this bad.

There is better movie trash to watch, bail on this one.