Your Daily Dracula – Patrick Stark, Dracula Consummation (2011)

Your Daily Dracula – Patrick Stark, Dracula Consummation (2011)

A barebones production made in Hallsville, Missouri, with varying screen shapes, inconsistent sound recording, awkward line readings and a blur of natural light videography (it’s a problem when you make a vampire movie but can’t really manage night scenes).  It has a contemporary setting – London and Transylvania look like slightly different stretches of Missouri – rather than attempt period costumes and horses and everyone in the cast looks to be in their early twenties (even Van Helsing, who has a grey wig with a flat cap pinned to it).  Perhaps reflecting its midwestern origins, it centralises Quincy Morris (Dana Brush), who wears a cowboy hat and duster and has a big collection of guns (he gives each of his allies a different calibre pistol).  A big chunk of the running time is a John Woo-on-a-peanuts-budget shoot out between the fearless vampire hunters and Dracula’s crew of tooled-up professional minions (the gypsies from the novel) with many shots of people jerking unfired guns in sync (more or less) with sound effects and the odd animated muzzle flash.

For all this, it takes an unusual approach to adaptation.  Most versions of Dracula feel ‘the good stuff’ – Jonathan at the castle, the Demeter, Lucy dying, Lucy as bloofer lady, Lady getting staked – comes in the first half of the book.  This opens with Quincy at Lucy’s grave after she’s been destroyed and is entirely about the already-ticked off gang of good guys chasing Dracula back to his lair to be destroyed.  Among the oddities is renaming a few characters – Dr Seward becomes Dr Sewerd (Quenton Laroe) and everyone calls Mina (Kristi Millam) Minya (like Godzilla’s son?) or maybe Miña.  It’s kind of tricky to tell the vampire hunters without hats apart – Jonathan (Dylan Robertson) and Arthur (Dallas Laroe) get lost in the shuffle – though as usual Renfield (Caleb White) goes big when everyone else deadpans.  Director Patrick Stark, who also co-wrote with Dana Simmone Lockwood, makes a decent low-key Dracula, walking up to the hunters’ barbeque with chilly arrogance and malevelence then announcing his invincibility in non-Stokerian language.

The most effective sequence, using a few new elements, is Van Helsing and Mina’s encounter with the three vampire brides (Courtney Chandler, Steffanee Richardson, Chelsea Lockwood) – who only Mina initially can see, and who unusually just stand there in the landscape (very flat, sparsely-wooded Carpathians) being evil.  Quincy dies killing Dracula and – in another new bit – Mina pleads with Van Helsing not to publish all this in a book because she and her new family don’t want to have this story come up every twenty minutes for the rest of their lives.  Music is credited to Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Clint Mansel and others – but sounds like stock cues to me.  It’s not the only modern dress Dracula shot on available locations.