My notes on Dracula in Love (2018)
An absolutely minimal-effort horror movie, with about enough plot for the prologue of the average Hammer film – and a lot less than the prologue of, say, Vampire Circus – drawn out to a mind-numbing 87 minutes of nothing much, set entirely in a well-lit warehouse that characters keep describing as ‘spooky’.
Nash (Eyal Simko) is looking after the place for his drunk uncle Stuart (Alan K. Sapp) and invites his pal David (Josh Maltin) over with David’s girlfriend Nancy (Amy Cruichshank) and Nancy’s slightly goth friend Leila (Cailey Muse). These good-looking people drink, have sex, bicker, wander about and fill in the time until Leila discovers a crate containing Dracula (Youssef Abed-Alnour), who is hear an Uncle Fester-look bald hunchback wearing a sack … though he regenerates into a buff naked guy (Andre Luis Oliveira) briefly in the climax.
Director-writer Izidore K. Musallam fills the film with inconsequential chat, and some musings on love that feel beside the point since all the characters are uniquely unloveable. It avoids anything like action, with the simplest bits of business (Leila climbing a stack of wood, someone being hung upside-down) staged in close-up inserts that fail to disguise the fact that the action hasn’t been fully staged. The young men are interchangeable planks in a building full of stacks of wood, while the women are at least distinguishable – one blonde, the other dark. No relation to John Shirley’s novel of the same title.
Discussion
No comments yet.