Your Daily Dracula (Happy New Year Edition) – Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness (2004)

Posted by kimnewman ⋅ January 1, 2021 ⋅ 1 Comment

My notes on Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness (2004).

A dopey concept, poorly executed. A thousand years in the future, where Christianity is forgotten but bad rap music is still around and people make remarks about The Bionic Woman, elements from Dracula are tipped into a cheap Event Horizon knock-off. Captain Abraham Van Helsing (Casper Van Dien) and his grumbling space-salvage foragers board the derelict spaceship Demeter in ‘the Carpathian Galaxy’ to find the crew dead. A recorded log from Captain Varna (Udo Kier) is ominous about a cargo of sand-filled coffins from ‘the planet Transylvania’. Dracula (Langley Kirkwood), using the name Orlock, is a pantomime-cloaked, surprisingly inactive vampire. He turns doper 187 (Coolio) into the worst-ever black vampire, but doesn’t murder everyone. In an Alien-related twist, Orlock lets heroine Aurora Ash (Erika Eleniak) escape, prompting everyone to suspect her – tying her to a chair in imitation of The Thing – until she reveals she’s a bloodless robot/undercover narc.

There’s a germ of an idea in pitting an ancient vampire against people from a culture that has forgotten what he is and how to destroy him, though computer files confirm that a wooden pool-cue will do the job (in 2950, pool cues were still made of wood, unlike in 3000, we are told) until the ship can be brought near enough a double star to flood it with sunlight. Oddly, this latter plan isn’t the ending – which manages to run in rapid succession through three dud finishes: Dracula is defeated by having his arm torn off in a closing door and wanders off in pain, surviving horny crewman Humvee (Tiny Lister) discovers Ash used to be a ‘pleasurebot’ and lecherously throws her over his shoulder (among the worst-acted scenes in Dracula movie history) and Varna’s tape message somehow blows up the ship. Being the worst Dracula movie made in a year with Van Helsing and Blade Trinity is some sort of achievement. Written and directed by Darrell James Roodt, a South African auteur who alternates genre (City of Blood, The Stick) and dully respectable (Sarafina!, Cry, the Beloved Country).