Your Daily Dracula – Marcus Massey, Dracula in Space (2026)
Spaceships called Demeter featured in the Buck Rogers ‘Space Vampire’ episode and the not-fondly-remembered Dracula 3000 – and here’s a basic British micro-budget redo of the does-what-the-title-says premise.
Director Gregory William Randolph Jr – a multiple Emmy award winner* – and writer C.M. Wright – who has Krampus in Space coming up – plainly had very little to spend, so this is the kind of throwaway which makes Dracula 3000 look like a real film. The Demeter is played by what looks like an abandoned school, complete with swing doors, coat-hooks, brick walls, fireplaces, gaming chairs, foraged-from-scrapheap bits of console and about ten seconds of CGI exterior. It riffs on Alien as a distress signal prompts the Demeter to rendezvous with a derelict ship and bring on board a fibreglass coffin which might contain the spirit of a straggle-haired, foam-headpiece Dracula (Massey) who is vaguely intangible – his spell in limbo is conveyed by having him claw at a hanging sheet – but out to get back to reality and blood-drinking.
It’s a sequel to the Stoker novel, but by some coincidence the crew of the ship includes characters called Captain Harker (Charlotte Reidie), Morris (Paul Leon) and Seward (Ashley O’Brien) with Data-type ‘synth’ Sol (Felipe Chavez) discovering a double named Renfield who unsurprisingly turns out to be the minion of the vampire. The cast pitch in earnestly but the staging is so feeble that the film never clicks on the level of, say, the cheapest Roger Corman Alien knock-off of the 1980s.
*for Fashion Week: Best Dressed Pads, Escape to Saint Martin and Luxury Living in the Hamptons, since you asked.
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