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Cinema/TV, Dracula, Film Notes

Your Daily Dracula – Harrie Huijs as Damion Dracula, Dracula’s Family Visit (2006)

Your Daily Dracula – Harrie Huijs as Damion Dracula, Dracula’s Family Visit (2006)

A very low-budget Dutch horror comedy – not, on the evidence of an unsubtitled print, too funny but with enthusiastic performances and a nice little theatre feel.  Directed by Monique Breet, who also co-wrote with André van Leeuwen, it depicts a contemporary, dysfunctional take on Dracula’s menage.  Count Damion Dracula (Harrie Huijs) lives with creepy daughters Lotti and Luna (Luca and Robin Schoonheijt) – who are different ages, but sort of Siamese twins (they seem to be handcuffed together) – and sundry vicious minions.  His non-vampire sister Agaath (Marjolein van Ziel) comes to stay, with her twelve-year-old daughter Fiorentina (Maria Stuut), who is spooked by her cousins and reads the omens when her date of death is filled in on a gravestone.  Also involved are a couple of tourists (Veerle Snijdners, Gwendolyn Snowdon), who blunder into becoming victims, and local vampire hunter Frank van Helsing (Roel Peeters), who is scheming to get a bomb into the Dracula household.  A lot of uncomfortable family dinners play out, with used tampons and mobile phones in the stew served at table, and quite a bit of physical gross-out comedy features.  Huijs is a sleek, balding paterfamilias Dracula, gnawing on victims and barely controlling his household – but the younger generation (Stuut and the Schoonheijt sisters) tend to steal the film.  There’s a painting of Christopher Lee up on the wall – it gets white stuff squirted all over it – and some elementary gore effects, but mostly it’s people milling about being casually nasty to each other.

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