Your Daily Dracula – Mike Ferguson, Dracula Eternal (2026)
This direct-to-streaming low-budget Los Angeles Dracula adaptation has no onscreen credit for director or writer – the IMDb lists ‘Alan Smith’, who may be a relative of the late ‘Alan Smithee’, the pseudonym once adopted by directors who didn’t want to put their real names on films which had been taken away from them. Cinematographer David M. Parks has also worked as a director on films at this level – he has BacHELLorette Party and Swipe Right, Shoot Left upcoming – so maybe he’s the man behind the pseuodonym … or maybe not.
It’s easy to discern some of the tells of a Smithee production – the film equivalent of hesitation cuts … a Nosferatu-ish vampire mask which is prominent on the ad art but barely glimpsed in the film (the images here come from outtakes under the end credits), characters whose names in the film are different from the ones in the credits (heroine Mina Harper is her more normal Harker in the end crawl), plot threads which are supposedly important but just lie there (this film’s Jonathan is killed off early and no one even wonders where he’s gone), great random infodumps in tedious speeches and token action or horror scenes which feel like run-throughs before the real takes.
It’s the latest of a trickle of films which reset Bram Stoker’s story in modern L.A. because that’s where the filmmakers live and they can’t afford period sets and locations – but it doesn’t even make a token attempt at filming outside mock-gothic mansions or spooky tourist attractions and instead favours abandoned industrial buildings, stacks of shipping containers and average neighbourhoods. The plot hook is that past-its-sell-by-date business about Vlad’s lost love and his attempt to coerce a lookalike or reincarnation into hooking up with him – though, to give the film credit, this Mina (Cody Renee Cameron) is having none of it and tells the old perv where to get off. Vampire murders are being ascribed to a serial killer and only two cops – one of whom is also the perp – are on the case, but also take time to follow up on Mina’s complaint that she’s being hassled by loon Mr Fields (Nathan Smith-Finley), who at least knows enough to borrow Dwight Frye’s Renfield ‘hnnnh-hnnnh’ laugh. Mina’s best friend Lucy (LeeAnne Bauer) gets bit, her fiancee Jonathan (Cardon Ellis) is killed by the vampire, the lady cop (Denise Milfort) takes a brutal beating from the Renfield analogue, and a priest Mina finds on Yelp (William ‘Bill’ Connor) gives her a lesson on history and vampires.
Top-billed Mike Ferguson has a few too many tattoos (Ferguson is a former tattooist who used his skin to advertise his services) to be credible as a homicide cop and his character name (Drake Paula) suggests the Count has given up on all that anagrammatical Alucard guff and picked his monicker by using the Al Jaffee/MAD Magazine Fold-In approach. Ferguson is a hulking thug – all the men in this film are on the hefty side, which makes Cameron look tiny – whose main character note is whining self-pity, which is no more appealing in a screen Dracula than in anyone else. Obviously shot on a budget which makes the Asylum look like MGM under Irving Thalberg, it’s gussied up a bit with fancy titles and Day of the Week markers as if the plot were building up to a significant date but overdoes the current vogue for using a lot of drone shots of nighttime streets.
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