Your Daily Dracula – Leslie Stewart, Queen Dracula (2017)/Mel Heflin, Queen Dracula Sucks Again (2024)
Though it clocks in at slightly under an hour, this modern-dress, gender-flipped Bram Stoker adaptation still has time for a lengthy scene in which Lucy (Emily Ann Miller) discusses her ambiguous sexuality with an Air Conditioner repairman. That’s only one of many bizarre decisions writer-director Curtis Everitt, evidently working on a microbudget, makes in his rearrangement of the storyline.
Here, Jonathan Harker (Danny Zanelotti) is a middle-aged widower who has lost his faith since his wife’s death, and Mina (Abigail G. Holmes) and Lucy are his stay-at-home daughters, who get pestered by unpleasant suitors because of their dowry. Jonathan receives a postcard (signed ‘D’) from the ghost town of Transylvania, and drives there. He encounters a houseful of oddballs who more or less stand in for Dracula’s brides, then comes home with a new fiancée, the vampire Queen Dracula (Leslie Stewart). Lucy, who has adopted a short haircut and mannish dress so people will think she’s gay, is put in an asylum for complaining about Daddy’s new girlfriend, and bothered by a female Renfield type and the nasty Dr Seward (Jonathan Dixon), who has been one of Mina’s gold-digging beaux. Mina teams up with ex-cop Van (Aaron Mitchell) to go after the vampire brood with very thin stakes – and in a final confrontation, the Queen manifests as a witchy older woman (Melanie Calvert Benson) and a young goth princess (Meredith Mohler) before being destroyed.
It’s strangely prissy as a horror movie (bleeping out bad language) and leans heavily into religion without coming on as a faith-based film. These vampires’ horror of religious objects extends to Jonathan’s wedding ring — QD is vanquished when he puts it on again as he abandons his atheism. Technically, it’s very rough – oddly-paced, awkwardly acted, clumsily-staged, and over-reliant on greenscreen backdrops. Stewart is enthusiastic, and the use of three actors as the Dracula figure is interesting.
There’s a sequel …
Queen Dracula Sucks Again (2024)
In a horror hostess type intro, Queen Dracula (Mel Heflin) admits that this 46-minute film – which has many many longeurs – is for fans of cheesy sequels where no one comes back from the first film and there’s no continuity with it either. Fair enough, but it’s also for anyone who can put up with wittering-on scenes involving divorced Dad Claude (director-writer Curtis Everitt) thinking about his son playing in the park, failing to click at a speed date, slowly touring a big empty surprisingly affordable house then going through exactly the same rooms with goth corset chick ‘Selene’ (a QD alias) doing a Lugosi-accented tour guide act before finally – finally! – biting him and ending the whole thing. Everitt has 105 IMDb directorial credits since 2011.
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