Your Daily Dracula – Ken Mitzkovitz as Abraham Van Helsing, Keith Jordan as Michael Van Helsing, The Adventures of Young Van Helsing The Quest for the Lost Sceptre (2004)
Director/writer Kevin Summerfield at least namechecks Bram Stoker in the end credits, which is more than Stephen Sommers did –this no-budget effort views Ken Mitzkovitz’s Abraham Van Helsing – an American with a fedora and jungle explorer duds – as a out-of-copyright Indiana Jones. The obvious impetus was Sommers’ ‘Gabriel Van Helsing’ film of the same year, and Summerfield has form with mockbusting – he made Sleepy Hollow High and Max Magician and the Legend of the Rings, neither exactly at the top of my to-be-watched list – though this also treads vaguely in the steps of the Buffy and Librarian franchises. It does ring one or two changes – in this version of the VH dynasty, Dracula was just one of the original Van Helsing’s minor adventures and he was more concerned with even bigger bads like Simon Magus (Joe Zaso) and Morgan LeFay (Kimberly Cash). That said, it’s pretty ropey even by the standards of, say, the Asylum and is stuck with some of the most awkward line readings heard in non-porno movies. It’s unfair to single out cast members but one of the characters is so excruciatingly off in their very few scenes that you get a sense he was the member of the band who owned the van they drove to locations in and was therefore impossible to fire.
It opens in 1905 with the original VH having a last battle with Simon Magus – remember Jack Palance (a screen Dracula!) playing him in The Silver Chalice – who is here a Nosferatu-bald, manky-teethed rebel angel/demon who is seeking ‘the lost sceptre of God’ to bring Hell on Earth. Bastard, eh? In the present day, Professor Arad (Ned Narang) – a descendent of Van Helsing’s Short Round-type Indian boy sidekick (a white kid in a turban) – looks after a Raiders-type storehouse of crates of mystic importance which seems to be inside a stock shot of the Albert Hall – actually, quite a funny idea – and realises SM I back and only the last descendent of VH, a high school Michael J. Fox wannabe called Michael Harris (Keith Jordan), is worthy of recovering the sceptre and confronting SM, who has bought a black trenchcoat and shades in the last 100 years. The film then does typical high school schtick – bullying, crushes, build-up to the dance – and seriously seems more worked up about Michael’s garage band rehearsals than the impending confrontation with a baddie of awesome power.
Several things raise eyebrows – like the only casualties being the two black kids in the mean guy/girl posse, who Simon skeletonises while sucking out memories … like the extra feature on the DVD chronicling the meticulous creation of a zombie dog animatronic which looks terrific for this level of filmmaking but unaccountably got cut out of the finished film while two whole songs from the band get played at the big post-battle high school dance … like the general uselessness of the vaguely likeable young hero, who defeats a supposedly immortal, all-powerful supernatural being just by showing up while his chubby dolt best pal (Thomas Bauer) unearths the sceptre he buried on a whim after stealing it from the mail when he was younger and has only just remembered … like the bullying jock idiot (Johnny Alonso) who looks weedier than the supposed nerd hero and has terrible hair … like the blonde heroine (Joy Griffin) with a Southern accent who somehow determines in a high school lab that some burning dust is an unknown magic substance … like the burning car which is incidental to the climax but must have been a major budgetary expense so the film keeps cutting back to it.
In the course of Your Daily Dracula, I’ve watched a lot of videoed high school productions of Dracula – most have a kind of charm which eludes this nearly professional movie.
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