Your Daily Dracula – Jack Maxwell as Dr John Stoker, Insane Like Me? (2024)

Your Daily Dracula – Jack Maxwell as Dr John Stoker, Insane Like Me? (2024)

At a guess, two-thirds of the budget for this Texas-set vampire movie went to signing busy Eric Roberts as the Sheriff … it’s a surprise that he isn’t just aboard for a couple of shot-in-a-day behind-a-desk scenes (Roberts has done several of those) but actually interacts with the rest of the cast and plays a character who has complicated (if hard-to-parse) relationships with everyone else.  Written by star Britt Bankhead and director Chip Joslin, the oddly-titled film straggles somewhat and never quite gets its story on focus – though the ellipses make for some useful weirdness.

In a long prologue, Jake (Bankhead), back from a war in Iraqistan, goes to a party with GF Samantha (Grace Patterson) and her asshole brother Will (Paul Kolker) at a hotel which seems to be the locus of 200-plus disappearances dating back for centuries.  Sam and Will are the kids of Sheriff Davis (Roberts), who disapproves of Jake for some reason.  At the party, a couple of at-first-seemingly-incidental girls flash fangs and attack other guests … and Sam, who hasn’t told Will she’s pregnant, disappears though in a garbled twist the Sheriff had been planning for Jake to vanish, suggesting he’s in cahoots with the suckers though that isn’t confirmed by the rest of the action.  After beating Jake up, the Sheriff has him committed to an asylum – rather than sent to Death Row or shooting him while trying to escape – and after the title is finally written on the wall (in bodily fluids) he has nine years of being beaten by a hulking guard and smugged at by the chief shrink before he’s let out and comes home for revenge.

Will is now an asshole deputy and deliberately misremembers Jake as his sister’s killer … Jake actually is at least semi-insane and sees Sam about haunting him … and Sam’s sister Crystal (Samantha Redd) is oddly inclined to help out, dragging in a bunch of her doomed-to-die friends.  The film has ideas, like the vampire version of H.H. Holmes who has built the trap hotel – but the location is not set up (no real exteriors) and we never really get a sense of it as a lair with booby traps or vampire crypts.  In Caligari style, asylum head Dr John Stoker (Jack Maxwell) is the chief vampire – though despite his Dracula-affiliated character name, he just seems to be a regular serial killer bloodsucker with no particular backstory as if this film manifestly couldn’t afford historical flashbacks.  We see a creepy little kid vampire, but it’s never confirmed or denied that it’s Jake and Sam’s son – and I’m not sure what Sam’s status actually is for the bulk of the film.  Other characters come and go, as needed – mostly to be offed in gory manner.  It’s scrappy but not without its moments – the idea that some girls at a party blend in and are accepted as part of the scenery before they turn out to be vampires is relatively fresh.