Fiancée of Dracula (2002)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
A professor and his assistant are trying to track down Dracula but aren't having any luck so instead they locate his fiancée and have her released from a nun-ran mental hospital. Once the fiancée is out, various circus freaks help her locate Dracula and of course the Van Helsing-wannabe is along for the tracking. After years of ill-health and not tackling any movies, director Jean Rollin tried a comeback with TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES and this film, which followed five years later. Sadly, neither film returned the director to his glory days of the 1970s but I guess fans can at least be thankful that he did get to crank out a few more movies. This film here, plot wise, is an incoherent mess that never really adds up to much of anything. At 90-minutes the film is way too long because it's hard to get any type of feeling for the actual story since the thing is all over the place. I'm not sure if Rollin just wanted to throw everything on the picture and hope that something would stick but sadly the end result is rather lame and not much works. The biggest problem is that none of the characters are all that interesting and this is especially true of the three most important ones. The professor just comes off as a fool and it's hard to take anything he's doing very seriously. The fiancée is very poorly written and whatever motivations she has just roll off. Then there's the Dracula character who has to be one of the weakest versions from any film. Not only do we get vampires but there's also a semi-zombie and a wolf-woman. This wolf is one of the film's saving graces since she's played by the cult favorite Brigitte Lahaie, an actress who appeared in several of Rollin's earlier films. She's the only real energy in the film as she gets to have fun playing the bad girl and she even gets to make a return in a lesbian sequence. You certainly can't take away from the fact that she looks incredibly good at this stage in her life. As you'd expect, there's some gore and nudity but even this is rather tame and boring. There's just really no reason for one to be involved with anything going on since Rollin can add any energy to what we're watching. Fiancée OF Dracula is only for those Rollin fans who must watch everything he did.
