Vlad

Vlad (2003): Boy did this horror flick come with a lot of words. The scrip writer must have been paid by quantity rather than quality. We have both transitive and intransitive verbs along with some pluperfect tense thrown in for effect. This movie does take a little different slant on the Dracula legend and there are no standard Mark One vampires on display, indeed not a single neck is bitten here. Those looking for a throat slashing time will be disappointed but those who enjoy long boring conversations will be pleased.

The story goes something like this: four honor students are invited to Romania to study at the locations where Vlad Drakul actually lived. One of them is a native Romanian who has a magic medallion once worn by Vlad. Apparently, the closer this little bauble gets to Romania, the more Vlad comes back to life and he tends to take a dim view of those still alive. However, he is a randy old bugger and beds down several of the movie’s starlets by the end of the flick. He also threatens to kill everyone, and the group needs to get the medallion back to the ‘sacred tomb’ to deactivate the ‘curse of Vlad’ while also fending off a group of Vlad supporters trying to keep them from completing their mission. The movie has quite a few threads sewn into the plot including Brad Dourif as a Romanian official and Billy Zane working on his best Romanian accent. The movie has many flashbacks, a bit of narration by John Rhys Davis, time travel, an occasional impaling, and lots of smoke and fog to hide the low budget. Shot in Romania, it is not a good movie at all but at least is a very different tale of Dracula. The movie is rated R for: multiple breastulations, trans-dimensional sex, a single impaling, multiple slashings, rampant talking, old castles, and for too much verbosity and not enough velocity.