Your Daily Dracula – Ethan Daniel Corbett, Monster Mash (2024)
As an anniversary logo announces, the Asylum – proprietors of a conveyor belt of schlock – have been around for a quarter of a century. Though known for shark films (the Sharknado series) and ‘mockbuster’ ripoffs (Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train), they started out with gory gothic horrors – Frankenstein Reborn, Way of the Vampire – and someone there (I guess producer David Michael Latt) obviously would rather be making Hammer/Universal-type creature quickies than yet more mutant shark attack shit.
When trading on the ad-pub for Morbius seemed like a good idea, the Asylum greenlit Dracula: The Original Living Vampire, for instance. Though the outfit found that it was possible to rejig titles just enough to pass off no-budget wretchedness on unwary renters who were looking for proper films – so they might, say, get the dirt cheap I Am Omega instead of I Am Legend or Independents’ Day instead of the costly Independence Day – the Asylum were mostly shut out by zealous protection of copyright from making proper superhero movies, leaving the Marvel and DC knock-offs to the constitutionally-protected porn parody arena … except for the special case of Almighty Thor, who battled evil in a parking lot on the principle that it is very hard to secure copyright on Norse myths. Previously, the Asylum toyed with doing their takes on the Avengers or the Suicide Squad by assembling characters left over from public domain fairy tales and nursery rhymes in the Avengers Grimm and Sinister Squad movies.
In Monster Mash – written and produced by Jose Predes – the Asylum take a bash at a team-up hero squad based on the Universal monsters roster – if not the copyrighted Universal monsters make-ups – which feels closer to the X-rated League of Frankenstein than precedents like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Van Helsing. Note that the Monster Mash Invisible Man has the same name (Hawley Griffin) as the one in the LXG comics. The premise is that Victor Frankenstein (Michael Madsen) is old and ailing and sends his monster Boris (rough-foreheaded Erik Celso Mann) out to collect bits and pieces of other monsters – blood from Dracula’s Daughter Elisabeta (Emma Reinagel, with a dopey accent), the heart of the mummy Rameses (Adam Slemon), the arms and legs of a wolf man called Charles Conliff (Ian Hummel) and some skin from the Invisible Man (Gabriel Pranter) to create a giant monster body he can transfer his consciousness into. Ticked off by this, Dracula (Ethan Daniel Corbett) corrals the offended monsters and the turncoat Boris into a team to take Frankenstein down.
The trouble is the plot sounds a lot more exciting than it is – it took me three hours to watch Monster Mash because I kept nodding off during long, dull underlit dialogue scenes which involve people putting on silly voices and intoning at length about not much. A witch (Bix Krieger) pitches in to help and as cheerleader. About an hour in, there’s a Homicidal-style Fright Break to give audiences worried that the horror of the climax will be too much for them a chance to stop watching. It won’t be horror which makes many less stubborn viewers than me turn off the film before this point.
After invading the castle of Frankenstein – we get periodic overhead views of castles which look like out-takes from a build-your-own-gothic-environment online game – and tackling booby traps which require special skills like invisibility and hairy growling to get past, the climax has Victor turn into a big CG monster which looks nostalgically like stop-motion animation done by amateurs with no resources and Dracula transforms into a big bat to fight him. The other monster mashers just stand around watching.
You kind of wish this worked – it has tana leaves in and a few speeches about monsters banding together are almost sweet – but it has all the Asylum shortcuts … a miscast top-billed name who barely interacts with the rest of the film, make-weight supporting players who just aren’t up to their roles (in a pinch, Hummel is the best of the bunch), a lot of dreary padding, and a lack of anything like atmosphere or excitement. Slow-talking, thin-lipped, uncloaked Corbett looks as if he were trying for the role of the MC in Cabaret rather than playing Lord of the Vampires – he’s one of the least impressive Draculas on record.
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