Your Daily Dracula – Tim Lee, Dracula’s Bride of Horror (2022)
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Your Daily Dracula – Tim Lee, Dracula’s Bride of Horror (2022)
As ‘Tim Lies’, director-actor-writer Tim Lee made Dracula Vampyre in Beijing in China. He changes his name but wears the same cloak and fangs in this Los Angeles-shot follow-up, which features a black and white precis of the earlier movie in the middle. However, it’s a different (and better) beast – if still plagued with repetition, wandering-around and general muddle. It’s not really a horror film but a stab at a kind of art movie, with asides about the state of America c 2022 as conspiracy theories, gun nuts, alienation and crackpottery take hold.
Set around Venice, California – on the same streets and piers stalked by Zandor Vorkov back in Dracula vs Frankenstein – it opens with an Asian woman (Rae Daniels) being bitten under the pier by Dracula and joining his coven of striding-around-the-night witches, then concentrates on Vivian Harker (Mehra Park), a woman who gave up her dream of being an actress (she was up for the lead in Netflix biopic of Barbara Steele) to marry psychiatrist Dr Jack Harker (Kyle Colton), who has cheated on her with his secretary Miss Weston (Junie Hoang – a Dracula trivia deep cut, ‘Weston’ is the simplified version of Westenra used in the 1931 film). Vivian wanders introspectively and runs into Dracula – who is busking in a wig, calling himself ‘Rockula, Prince of Rockness’, and gives her a self-actualisation pep talk which brings her over to the dark side. Meanwhile, Harker treats Mrs Sunnydale (Elaine Ballace), who has been driven mad by watching ‘too much Fox News’, and Vivian’s stepsister Mariam (Lacey Rae) is on the couple’s case. A ghoul (Ian Loren) offers a plate of worms to Vivian.
These people mostly just walk while we get voice-overs, and make phone calls to each other – possibly for production reasons, but it underlines the alienation. There’s a weird sub-plot about a room in a Los Angeles building where there have been many murders, plus a creepy child-doll – which might even be the nugget of another picture altogether. It’s padded by a lot of indifferent rock music as if it were a long pop video and some sequences are extended mercilessly by repeated shots – Harker hops on a motorbike and goes somewhere, with many many shots of his face … we expect a crash, but this can’t stretch to that. A hooker (Shannon Allen) asks Dracula if he has a match and he comments ‘not since Christopher Lee died’; Mrs Sunnydale compares the Fox News hosts selling her Lizard People stories to Bela Lugosi. Those are decent namechecks, but this is more Zandor Vorkov’s territory.
