O Despertar de Drácula

3 is underrating this movie. I give 10 out of 10. It has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also has great special effects. If it does not scary you no movie will. Dracula (1992) is better. Dracula (March 1931) is also. But still this great film. It is very scary. It more about Dracula's son then Dracula. It is still very scary. Nosferatu (1922) is better. This is a lot better then Nosferatu (1979). That is one awful Dracula movie. This is a Dracula sequel. There are a lot of Dracula sequels. And most of then a great film. This is one that is great. This is a very scary move. I need more lines and I am running out of things to say.

...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 one works outside the box. Time travel, reincarnation, eternal love and a blonde Dracula. Highly erotic and clever 50s doo wop love songs, Eastern European medieval settings, fabulous scenery. One of Roger Corman's best! Appreciate this one for pushing the envelope in creative ways.

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.