I Dream of Dracula

Sex sells, as anyone on Madison Ave. can tell you. That's about all that I DREAM OF Dracula has going for it, but all it achieved as a result is dubious exposure on those Mill Creek 6-pack and 50-clunker boxed sets.

A period prologue shot MOS and in black & white sets up the premise of children, the boy of which will remain endlessly young as leader of a vampire cult, and terrible child actor to boot. The girl becomes an old harridan dragged back into the plot.

But their antics take a back seat to a pair of full-frontally-nude vampire ladies played by Spike and Jeni King D'Errico, one of them a huge-breasted ready-for-porn thesp and the other a flat goth type. They deliver the soft porn lesbian sex goods, while all around them dullness prevails.

Videomaker Jim Haggerty keeps on cranking out this junk, though I would guess the dwindling DVD market should hopefully put an end to that. His latest is titled "Is This a Joke?", my sentiments exactly.

'I Dream of Dracula' (2003) is somewhat erroneously titled, since the pair of darkly draped, charcoal-lipped vampires in troubled Priscilla's (Michelline Shafranski) twitchy, handheld B/W fever dream are undeniably female, with one pallid, especially suck-able succubus bodaciously blessed with the pulchritudinous dimensions of a youthful Brigitte Lahaie, so perhaps it should more realistically read 'I Dream of Jean Rollin movies', as Jim Haggerty's fitfully amusing, made-for-bupkis, zero-frills, moderately fleshly thrills, written by a roomful of mashed up monkey's project has about as much to do with Bram Stoker as Keanu Reeves British accent, and while 'I Dream of Dracula' rarely looks or sounds better than an equally grungy, skinflint skin-flick, you gotta' admire the sizable chutzpah of Haggerty deliberately aggregating so many monotonous-sounding individuals without one measly mote of acting ability between them in this heroic attempt to breathe a minim of sentience into his flaccid, pseudo-Gothic hokum about the increasingly neurotic travails of dizzy-headed Priscilla discovering that the truth about her oft-repeated, frequently shown dream sequence would ultimately lead to so much execrable acting, gratuitous, not entirely displeasing nudity, some truly risible death throes and a hugely distracting 'score' which sounded suspiciously like the pre-set demo song on a vintage Casio Pt-1 keyboard! The brain-needling fact that all of this lugubrious, Z-grade daftness could in any way be this entertaining is perhaps the not implausible suggestion that 'I Dream of Dracula' might simply be an elaborate hoax or skeezey succubi satire, a theorem given considerable verisimilitude by the protean, Beastie Boy's level absurdity of Pricilla's adulterous husband's dime-store Sopranos wig, which demonstratively steals every scene that it appears in! While part of me is genuinely appalled that I enjoyed this arrant nonsense as much as I did, fortunately the better part of me found it to be sublimely ridiculous and not infrequently hilarious, how could anyone not warm to a film liberally festooned with lines like: 'Satan, I presume?' and personal favourite, 'The Evil's gone from here...' 'Well, as long as she doesn't bring another fruit cake!' 'Ba-Dum-Tss!'