Your Daily Dracula – Saint Dracula (Dracula The Dark Lord) (2012)
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Mitch Powell, Saint Dracula (Dracula The Dark Lord) (2012)
Officially a United Arab Emirates production, this was mostly made in the UK (with a British cast) by Indian writer-director Rupesh Paul.
Dracula (Mitch Powell) is a romantic swain looking for the reincarnation of his lost love (again!), who turns out to be novice nun Clara (Patricia Duarte). Whispering monk Benjamin (Daniel Shyler) is out to impale Dracula for his connection with a string of murders committed by a female vampire who might be one of his cast-offs. Powell, dressed in a red ruffle shirt, talks about love and God, while Benjamin and Clara exchange Bible quotations which consistently seem beside the point. In a long, colour-desaturated flashback, all the principles appear as mediaeval characters analogous to their modern roles. It seems the thwarting of Dracula’s original love thanks to a jealous sister (Suzanne Roche) had something to do with his transformation into a blood-drinking immortal.
About an hour in, Paul includes a sedate musical number (in the Bollywood manner?) with Dracula striding through a pack of ballet dancers in black goth outfits. They return in white under the end credits, suggesting this might once have been a full-on musical (Clara’s singing is talked about but never heard). Just as Clara and Dracula are about to marry, Benjamin appears to throw a large crucifix-handled spear through the vampire’s heart – but Dracula has enough time to deliver a perhaps-blasphemous soliloquy to the figure of Christ on the cross before dying. A Welsh castle and churches and municipal buildings in Liverpool and Manchester add production value and the cast strike poses which are impressive until they have to spout terrible dialogue in deadly earnest. One of the odder Dracula movies, it’s still sluggish, monotonously acted and theologically dubious.
