Your Daily Dracula – Octavi Pujades, Vampiras The Brides (2022)
A telenovela-look Spanish-Colombian vampire movie, mostly set in Los Angeles. It opens in Transylvania in 1888 with Van Helsing (Carlos Lozano) brandishing the severed head of Dracula (Octavi Pujades) and using a zapping jewel to mindwipe a couple of the vampire’s brides who have apparently helped him get rid of the Big D.
In 2022, the brides only have vague memories of Dracula – cue token flashbacks to Spain and Romania – and are getting by on donor blood from plastic bags, while living their lives … Luna (Bruna Rubio, whose idea the film was) is a tough cop who specialises in undercover work while wearing a cut-to-the-tummy red evening dress … Adriana (Milett Figueroa) is a ‘Hollywood diva’ who seems to run an ad agency or a perfume company or something tony while living the high life in more fabbo outfits … and Katya (Yuri Vargas) is a student, though we presume she’s been repeating classes for decades and ought to have graduated by now. They don’t have much memory of each other but are all connected to Ingrid (Maria Conchita Alonso, the bullied secretary from Vampire’s Kiss), a human who runs some sort of Van Helsing-approved support group for non-murderous vampires.
The brides’ lives all get shaken up when a veiled figure (Johanna Fadul) starts picking off their friends and associates – and taking over the gang of stereotype cartel clowns Luna was in a feud with. It turns out that the nemesis is Mina Harker, who is fiercely loyal to Dracula’s memory and out for revenge. Directed and co-written by Ivan Mulero, Vampiras The Brides – which is mostly in Spanish despite the semi-English title – is obviously on the low-budget side, with very scrappy action scenes and dead giveaways like terrible CG muzzle flashes in the shoot-outs. It also hasn’t quite sorted out its rules – not killing people seems to give the brides an immunity to sunshine which isn’t shared by moaning Mina, though you get a feeling that this is mainly because the production didn’t want to stretch to too many expensive night shoots.
By now, we’ve seen too many vamp action films in which diva draculasses tear through gun-toting goons with super-fast vampire fu – and Vampiras is another one, without the benefit of the stuntwork, fight choreography, wire effects or framing and editing to get much out of it. It does land one good punch as Katya, who’s woken up in a morgue and charmed the medical examiner, rushes to the rescue and hist Mina with a super-charged blow which sends her flying through a wall and across a courtyard, carving a flaming runnel in the earth. Otherwise, it boils down to a lot of hissing and hair-pulling among a pack of women who sometimes have those klingon vampire foreheads popularised by Buffy. Noel G (Gugliemi), perhaps the most typecast actor in Los Angeles, has a tiny cameo as a cop – which must have been a relief after approximately 500 credits playing a gangbanger. Obviously, he came in for one day during the brief LA shoot – or else the film would have given him better material and more to do since he’s much stronger than the pack of sneery day-players cast as disposable goons.
Bram Stoker’s key cast don’t get much to do – Van Helsing has a Hugh Jackman coat and Dracula is just a sneery domineering baddie (though, to be fair, not appreciably worse than the average telenovela rich husband). A US pilot was made with a similar premise – The Brides – but it didn’t go to series.
Discussion
No comments yet.