Your Daily Dracula – Julian Sands as ‘Count Holiday’, Death Rider in the House of Vampires (2021)
Musician Glenn Danzig – of The Misfits and Samhain and a ton of other horror-adjacent projects – made his debut as a filmmaker with the anthology film Verotika, based on his self-published comic book. This follow-up is a vampire western in the tradition of From Dusk Till Dawn, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat and (ahem) BloodRayne 3. Danzig is well-enough connected to rope in some name performers and game-for-anything genre celebs but I have the impression something major went awry in production.
Given Danzig’s day job and various stabs at spaghetti western style, it seems likely the plan was to feature a Morricone-style, goth-flavoured score … which just didn’t happen. A long prologue of the Death Rider (Devon Sawa) and a topless blonde (Tasha Reign) riding through the desert ought to have a ‘Death Rider Theme’ thrumming and wailing away but doesn’t, which somehow makes it seem endless – and a cameo by Danny Trejo as vampire gunslinger ‘Bela Latigo’ stops the film dead in its tracks rather than perks it up.
Much of the movie takes place in a vampire sanctuary, which seems to be a brothel-saloon run by vampire monks under the command of Dracula stand-in Count Holiday (Sands) … Lee Ving is the bartended, the Soska Sisters are saloon girls. We see dancing and there really ought to be at the least rinky-dink piano plus riotous barroom noises, but it all takes place without atmos of any kind – which under some circumstances could be eerie but here just means you have to listen to the flat dialogue as the all-in-black stranger and various vampire types snarl at each other.
Among the Count’s posse are Carmilla Joe (Kim Director), Mina Belle (Ashley Wisdom), Kid Vlad (Victor DiMattia), Duke Von Wayne (Darren Richardson) and Drac Cassidy (Eli Roth). Everyone keeps talking about a fearsome vamp called Bad Bathory, who turns out to be Danzig – and is left alive for a sequel at the end, though the character has done nothing to earn it. The plot is basic – though he’s a vampire, Death Rider (no other name given) is out to kill the Count and the others because the Count has vampirised and enslaved Rider’s sister (Kansas Bowling). There’s some in-fighting among the vampires, and inventive uses of molten silver and the sunrise to do away with surplus characters via truly terrible CG flame effects. Sands, with a widow’s peak wig, sits at a desk and rants a bit before his come-uppance. I’ve seen better vampire westerns.
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