Your Daily Dracula – John V. Glover, The House of Van Helsing (2023)
Shot in Armenia but set in Romania, this five-part TV series has the aesthetic of a daytime soap opera – it dawdles through arguments before getting to action scenes which look like rehearsal run-through, augmented by a few optical zaps (green for goodies, red for baddies). British twins Caroline (Sian Altman) and Cody (Lewis Jamison) learn that they’re related to the monster-fighting Van Helsing family and join up with ‘Uncle Abe’ (Jason Lasky), the original Abraham Van Helsing – who’s a short, bald, bandana-fringed-jacket-tinted-shades old Californian hippy with orange eyes betokening half-vampire status.
He has allies in a couple of Roma women (Tatevik Mirzoyan, Shushan Stepanyan) with vague powers and Cody brings along a friend, Skip (Michael Alan Johnson), who can breathe blue on things and have visions of the recent past. The big bad in Elizabeth Bathory (Christi Angelique Jones), who comes across as the runner-up for a role in a community theatre version of Hocus Pocus, and she’s keen on combining the bones of Count Dracula with the dead body of the twins’ father (John V. Glover) to bring back the arch-vampire.
We also get zombies played by extras who seem never to have seen a zombie movie, prop weapons which cosplayers would scorn, reams of pointless chat – everyone agonises over relationships which barely register – and that atmosphere-free cam-corder look. After five episodes and a punch-up (with zaps) in a disused opera house (nice location), Bathory gets speared … but a final twist, which would be more shocking if the image weren’t in the opening credits montage of every episode, it seems Drac is back to make trouble in a series two which hasn’t so far come along. Directed by Dan Goldman, who also co-wrote with David Chandler and Blake Knight.
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