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Dracula 2000

Starring: Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell
Director: Wes Craven
Genre: Horror
Year: 2000
Rating: 2 / 5

Reviewed by Guest Scribe Avon

More humor than Dude, Where's My Car?, a more logical plot line than Vertical Limit, and more characters than Castaway - what more could a moviegoer hope for? Apparently a lot. Dracula 2000 - the latest installation in a series of modernized vampire flicks (Blade, John Carpenter's Vampires) - tries its best to bring some new blood (pun intended) into an already cluttered genre. While not failing miserably, its lack of any defining moments eventually dooms it to its two-star status.

As the movie begins, an ill-fated robbery by acting legend Omar Epps frees The Count from his hundred years of imprisonment. After a century of beauty sleep, Dracula decides it's time to settle down and start a family. To accomplish this end he travels to New Orleans to stalk the daughter of the man who had held him captive - a stunning young lady named Mary (Justine Waddell.) Once there, the Count begins to set up shop - including a brief interlude with Trekkie favorite Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) - and the race to find Mary begins, with Dracula's ex-captor Mr. Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer) and his lackey Simon in pursuit. Now the battle between mostly good and sort-of evil begins in earnest.

As characters go, Mary and her co-protagonist Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) are actually very likable characters - given very little to work with, they play their roles admirably and, if nothing else, give the audience someone to root for. The real problem with this movie is that it fails to ever capture its audience. It has several moderately entertaining fight scenes that could well enthrall the audience but all are too brief to be considered riveting. It plays up the romanticism and eroticism of the Dracula legend on several occasions, but again too briefly and too disjointedly to draw in the watcher. It even could have been a decent camp flick with its few brief moments of humor, but it apparently took itself too seriously to capitalize on several comedic situations. (The most obvious being that even though the movie was set in New Orleans, there were no shots at the Anne Rice vampire-wannabes that roam the streets - and not a single Virgin joke even though Mary works for Virgin Records.)

Additionally, various gaping holes infest the plot, my favorites being: (1) several miscellaneous vampires are never killed and are apparently still roaming the streets of New Orleans, (2) daylight apparently does not kill Dracula in the 1800's, but modern sunlight is much more painful, (3) Jesus -- who apparently was more vindictive then the Bible gives him credit -- unleashed vampires upon the world and apparently didn't care enough to stop their spread until the second millenium. All in all, this movie fails to deliver on any level - and will soon become just another genre filler on the video store shelf. True, there is a couple unique little plot twists, but if you did not see them coming by the time they are revealed, then you probably did not understand them when they were revealed. Either way, don't worry - you're not missing much.

Cast:

Certification: Rated R for violence and language.
Running Time: 99 minutes.

Additional Info: Internet Movie Database
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