Your Daily Dracula – Drakula Cinta (2013)

Your Daily Dracula – Drakula Cinta (2013)

In this version of the legend, Dracula – an Indonesian-looking fellow with an Elizabethan ruff and a scarlet-lined cape – was defeated centuries ago by a kung fu master who yanked out his fangs.

When a present-day crime boss (Torro Margens) steals the teeth from a museum, they get bled on and – in a moderately unusual turn of events – the spirit of Dracula manifests like the body-hopping alien/demon villains of The Hidden and Fallen, and possesses a succession of hosts who develop smoky eye make-up and enormous choppers, though eventually the arch vampire settles for lookalike of his old self and sets out – in an achingly usual turn of events – to track down the reincarnation of his lost love.  In an erotic thriller touch, the vampire picks on girls who wear red dresses, because they remind him of his lost love Mireya and trigger blurry flashbacks to his initial defeat.

Fortunately, Indonesia is defended by Ki Kusumo (writer-director-star Ki Kusumo), who heads up a nattily-uniformed branch of the official police (the female officers’ minidresses match Kusumo’s puked-oup-pizza shirt) that takes on supernatural threats.  Even more fortunately, when all the good guys are downed in a big battle, Kusumo’s young son/pupil Surya (Axel Putra Kusumo) steps in to administer a definitive battering, though there are a couple of payoff shocks after the vampire is defeated.

The tone is mostly knockabout, with a comical fat fellow (Rony Dozer, who might be the long-awaited reincarnation of Filipino exploitation mainstay Vic Diaz) among the possessees and a great deal of oohing and ouching in the big-scale scraps.  It’s short enough not to get on your nerves too much.  In a Bond-style pre-credits sequence, the auteur proudly watches his young son beat up a horde of his own men – presumably in a training exercise – on top of a building, which might prompt audiences to think that, given the choice, they’d rather have Dracula on the loose than little brat Surya.  Though the print on youtube only credits Kusumo as director, some sources cite A Leung Wong as director.

Here’s the trailer …

Here’s the whole film …