Your Daily Dracula – Tim Lies, Dracula Vampyre in Beijing (2016)

Posted by kimnewman ⋅ October 20, 2025 ⋅ Leave a comment

I have a sense that the story of the making of this truly weird picture – shot in China on very limited resources – would make an interesting documentary, but it’s still something of a chore to sit through. Director-star Tim Lies, who plays a rock star Dracula who does a lot of Christopher lee hand-clutch gestures, seems to have thrown this together to spotlight his horror-themed band – who might be called Dracula’s Coven or the Witches of Dracula – and it has the feel of a bunch of promo videos stuck together with clumsy exposition scenes. Lies never uses a shot once, so what could be 25 minutes of footage is stretched out to feature length by repeat views of every image in the picture.

Li Mei (Liu Xiao Yan) is a Chinese artist who has supposedly had international success for her horror-themed works – which consist of cutting eyeholes out of famous horror movie posters and glaring balefully out of the faces of Lugosi or Lee – and is off with her cosplay vampire pals to see a Dracula gig in what I presume is an authentic venue the size of a garage. Her boyfriend Zhao Guo (Hao Yi Bo) is impatient with all the mystic stuff and a bit of a downer – but she’s also the kind of girl who leaves a big birthday present behind in a café along with an untouched birthday cake. There’s a pointless car race to the venue, an endless reel of performance which might be one song stretched out by shots of Halloween decorations … then Li Mei is whisked off in a car presumably belonging to Dracula.

I get a sense that the film may not have had an easy production – the key scene would seem to be Dracula biting Li Mei, but we don’t see it … and one character is replaced by another with the same plot function half-way through as if the original actress got a job out of town or was just fed up with the process. A couple of older characters are played by young actors in white Warhol wigs (maybe the same wig) – one is a local loon who gets waylaid by Dracula’s cloaked girl band and torn limb from limb pantomime style (with no blood). A few elements are so ropily amateur I suspect they were intended to be silly – Igor (Will Matthews) has the fakiest pillow-under-a-jumper hunchback in cinema and the vampire slaves are kept in their place by being tethered to a wall with the kind of paper chains used in infants’ school decorations.

The day after the concert is the second night of the blood moon and Li Mei is presumed dead or undead, though her funeral ceremony takes place before she wakes up naked and fanged in the morgue and wanders off into the hills. Sometimes, she’s wearing a wedding dress and floats about in Birdemic-level superimpositions – which aren’t as funny as the boots dangling in frame to signify that Dracula wows audiences at his shows by levitating. A cop (Ivy Shan) leads Li Mei’s pals into the tunnels – a found location which isn’t made much of – to save the girl from plot limbo by shooting Dracula with a silver bullet, though that doesn’t work and a branch has to be used as a stake.