Your Daily Dracula – Bryan Beasley, Dracula’s Angel (2014)
Laura Randolph dreams of Dracula, but her surfer boyfriend wakes her up before she sees her vampire lover’s face … so she quits Los Angeles and moves to a small New England town where she gets a job as a waitress in a men-only hunting lodge. In most horror movies, a men-only hunting lodge would be the set-up for misogynist toxicity and it is here too – though not in the Count Zaroff sense but just because all the men who hang out there are assholes, especially the clod who owns the local gym and his whiny, chubby sidekicks. In an old house abutting the hunting preserve Laura meets Dracula – or a Dracula-type – who turns her into a vampire. When Dracula is pierced with an arrow and debatably destroyed by the gym guy, Laura does her best to avenge him and actualises herself while offing others – with a sort of happy ending in view.
Directed and written by Bryan Beasley and Carol Carson, who also do all the voices (fairly well), this is very crudely CG-animated using the sort of character/scene creation software most commonly employed by fanservice porn or homemade video games. Characters are blocky, ungainly, float above surfaces, get stuck on repeat mode and don’t really feel designed. This severely limits the potential of the story, which is mostly about how regular men are total loser dicks but a romantic vampire – basically a serial killer with a ruffled shirt – is a preferable alternative. It’s slathered over with music, too – sometimes maddening, sometimes effective. Dracula sometimes manifests as a tangle of tendrils. A few odd bits of dialogue are effective – the non-stop assholery of the guys at the club is teeth-grinding but not unbelievable and there’s a decent Kent Brockman-type skit as a TV newsman interviews the witness to a murder while heavily implying that the poor bystander is the killer.
The whole thing is on youtube.
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