Dracula Rising

The initiative for this movie to be made probably came from cashing in on Coppola's 'Dracula' aka 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (the love story plot is similar, the subplots are omitted) and this movie is also known as 'Corman's Dracula' (Roger Corman produced it).

'Dracula Rising' is very atmospheric nothingness with all the good early/mid-90's B-movie stuff like rhythm and atmosphere over content; vivid colors and use of colored lighting (mostly red and orange here); wafts of mist; low-key lighting with deep blacks; skewed camera angles; a lot of concern for picture composition; sporadic use of unusual image processing (has some shots of negative images); over-accentuated sound design (every step a character takes is like a drum beat and a fan that does half a rotation per second goes "WOOOSH", "WOOOSH"); practical effects and effects done with animation; relatively little action and the action it has is shot in medium or wide shots with a static camera and with not too rapid editing; theatricality crossing over into surrealism in production design, staging and acting; a super-basic but outlandish premise; shot in an old European country (Bulgaria); Gothic elements; female protagonist (the woman has at least as much screen time as the title character); lots of eroticism & at least one sex scene; this chiller doesn't miss much.

I actually saw this movie a couple of years ago, but I just thought about it now. Not sure why. Hmm, I'll put it on my list of questions that need answering. Hee hee. Just kidding! "Dracula Rising" isn't a bad movie, but it's not great. It has a great story with a lot of romance and horror. I'm also a fan of Christopher Atkins, that partly helped too. This was a movie at the time I rented it, couldn't get out of my head. I would recommend it for vampire or Dracula lovers. And I mean movies! Ahem. Overall, a good movie that just needed more direction. That's all, but there is something in this film you just have to enjoy. How in the heck otherwise would I have thought about it in a couple of years? 7/10

...well, a *pretty* good movie, anyway. But the movie wrapped around it is so confused and disorganized that it'll never find its way out. Theresa, an artist and art conservator, accepts an assignment in an unnamed Eastern European country (Bulgaria, in a fine performance as Romania) and finds it's located in a gorgeous ancient monastery inhabited by Vlad the Impaler's undead son, Vlad the Monk, and his victim/tormentor, Alec. There follows the 3000th version of the old vampire-meets-the-reincarnation-of-his-sweetheart plot, variant B (vampire heroically resists the temptation to turn her into a tormented *yawn* creature like himself). Add some dodgy historical research (i.e, a witch-burning, which didn't happen in the Orthodox countries; when the Impaler does appear he's wearing a bizarre armored half-mask to hide horrible burn-scarring, which looks as if he swiped it from the Broadway Phantom of the Opera), some hilariously inappropriate 1950s-style love songs, and a jaw-droppingly goofy sequence set in Hell (that's right) where the vampires suddenly acquire magic powers and hurl animated bolts at each other like cartoon wizards, and you'll have some idea what a mess this is. Give it a few points for pretty scenery (both landscape and physical - there's a totally nude underwater love scene) but otherwise, pass.

A misleadingly titled vampire romance in the Anne Rice, er, vein. After meeting a handsome stranger called Vlad at a gallery showing,a beautiful L. A. artist is commissioned to fly to Europe to restore an old painting, supposedly a portrait of Vlad The Impaler. Once there she is hounded by two warring vampires, the boring but romantic Vlad (a dull Christopher Atkins, who reminded me of David Peel in BRIDES OF DRACULA) and a goateed, evil bloodsucker who has lured her there so she can be turned into a bloodsucker too. Overlong flashbacks show that, in a previous life (groan...), she was a starving peasant girl during the black plague who had fluffy blow-dried hair, glamorous makeup, clean new-looking clothes and her own horse. Both of the melodramatic guys were monks back then, but the blond Vlad, who is one of the sons of the original Count Dracula, was tempted by her beauty, moving his intensely jealous (possibly homosexual) bearded buddy to beat him with a whip and have the girl burnt at the stake as a witch. Some people have to overreact to everything.

The bereaved Vlad then turned his back on the Church, became a vampire, and watched as his undead Dad turned the other guy into one too. For the last three centuries the two former friends have been pestering each other while Vlad awaited the girl's reincarnation. The two vampires finally face off in a berzerk finale that looks like it's taking place on an alien planet set left over from STAR TREK and has the "bad" vampire throwing glowing red and purple rays at the "good" vampire sort of like the way the Emperor throws handfuls of lightning around in the STAR WARS movies. Sharp camerawork and crisp colorful lighting keeep this watchable, but the material is overly familiar and none of the characters are particularly interesting. In one scene the heroine runs through a maze of tunnels populated by laughing vampire women who pop out and hiss at her every now and then in the manner of actors in a Halloween haunted attraction. (I'm not sure how the undead gals manage this, since the place is decorated with dozens of crosses!) The love songs on the soundtrack have a distinctly fifties sound that makes them seem jarringly out of place. Probably the movie's worst misstep is its ludicrous depiction of the "original" Dracula, who is seen briefly as a scuzzy, dumpy old man with male pattern baldness, an outlandish studded leather outfit, blisters around his mouth (a reference to STDs?), and a dopey face plate that looks like Hannibal Lecter's cannibal restraint mask after being left on the dashboard of a car on a very hot afternoon. One could read much more into the sexual angles here, but I don't know why anyone should bother. Roger Corman produced, and since the bigger and better known Dracula movie by Francis Ford Coppola made around the same time used the slogan "Love never dies", the ad artwork for this one settles for "Passion is immortal". It's heavy-handed and never very persuasive, but it has great Bulgarian location shooting and it's at least as good as some of Hammer's later, lesser vampire efforts like THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA and TWINS OF EVIL.

This film essentially begins with an artist by the name of "Teresa Jennings" (Stacey Travis) showing off some of her recent work at a gallery when she meets a young man by the name of "Vlad" (Christopher Atkins) who she seems to have an immediate connection with. Not long afterward she receives an invitation from a mysterious man named "Alec" (Doug Wert) to travel to Europe to help restore an extremely old painting from the renaissance. Eager for such an opportunity she accepts immediately and upon traveling to the monastery where the painting is kept she not only meets Alec-but Vlad as well. Yet even though she is happy to reuinite with Vlad she gets the feeling that something is not quite right-and then the horrors begin. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a very poor low-budget vampire movie which suffered from bad acting and an even worse script. In addition to that I thought that Christopher Atkins was terribly miscast for his particular role as well. That being said, I have few positive things to say about this film and for that reason I have rated it accordingly.