Dracula's Curse

Dracula's Curse is a B class horror film done on a low budget. While most of the scenes were well shot and the dialog was adequate, there was stodgy editing that left a good deal of time between lines. The story is about three groups, the regular vampires, an elite group of powerful pure blood vampires decedents of Dracula, vampires out to dilute the pure blood line lead by Van Helsing, and the vampire slayers that protect humanity from out of control vampires. The enter into an armistice, that eventually fails and leads to the final battle of 'good' v evil. Interesting, but nontraditional plot. Dracula is spoken of many times, but never seen until the very end. Semi-entertaining.

I won't say it was a bad offering, but why doesn't someone make a vampire film that actually is a vampire film and not another kung fu action movie where the villains just happen to drink blood? What we get from Dracula's Curse is once again lots of fancy gunplay, swordfighting and martial arts involving hot goth chicks, which seems to have become the rule for vampire films these days (Blade, Underworld, Van Helsing etc. etc.) The cast perform adequately, but there's nothing much for them to do except strike poses looking cool or angry. The fights are choreographed okay and there's no poorly done CGI to laugh at, but we have seen this sort of thing before and I expect better from The Asylum.

OK this is a low budget movie - but even some low budget movies have good acting. The film "Manticore", for example was low budget but it did stand up because the acting was good.

Draculas Curse lacks any descent acting - in many scenes the actors seem unsure of what their next line is which makes me wonder if this film was properly story boarded. The poor screenplay, direction and editing back up my suspicions.

The fight scenes were consistent with the general low quality of the film.

The story was kind of interesting but is over shadowed by the over all poor quality of the film.

Avoid at all costs

Seeing as Dracula's Curse was from The Asylum, you would expect bad acting, bad production values, bad scripting, bad special effects, bad story, bad everything really. Dracula's Curse does show more effort than most other Asylum outings, so it wasn't the case of not trying. The problem was that Dracula's Curse came across as too ambitious. There are good things certainly. The monster is cool-looking and does look good. Not all the acting is bad either, the best actor is easily Rhett Giles who oozes charisma and intensity and close behind is Christine Rosenberg as the villainess. And the costumes and sets are a step above most Asylum movies, not opulent but not amateurish. The camera work and editing is hit-and-miss, in the fight scenes they can get confused but everywhere else they're adequate. The sound does sound rather muddied and somewhat dated. The fight sequences do suffer from confusing editing and are not particularly exciting, while the dialogue is written in a way that begged for several re-readings/writes because it sound rather stilted and senseless at times. It is also too talky, some of what was said agreed could have been shown instead. The rest of the acting is not very good, Rebekah Kochan is just grating and Eliza Swenson is so stiff in quite possibly the biggest female role in the movie. Thomas Downey is nowhere near as problematic, but he is one of those cases where he is hindered by not having enough to work with. But it was really the story and the way the characters are written. The story does get bogged down by too many side-stories(not all of them relevant either) and draggy pacing, and because there are some scenes that are pondered on too long and others(often the more important) skimmed over some of the story can come across as convoluted. The most interesting scene was probably the weapons scene. That there are too many characters also hurts Dracula's curse, and hardly any of them are developed that well, the most interesting probably is Jacob Van Helsing. The villainess Bathorly was the worst case, Rosenberg is very commanding as her but Bathorly was very under-utilised and the "less talk, more show" thing would have helped. Others like Kochan's Trixie McFly veer on pointless. The twist is okay if not particularly mind-blowing or memorable. All in all, Dracula's Curse is not a terrible movie and is much better than other Asylum movies(and with director Leigh Scott's movies I'd say it's one of his better ones too) but suffers from over-ambition, convoluted storytelling and too many characters. 4/10 Bethany Cox

I write this review to save you from making the same mistake as I did.Bored on a Friday night,you download or rent this film.Rating nearly 5 on IMDb and with some positive reviews so should be good for a laugh at least.I guarantee that if you watch this film you may wince,cry,curse,cringe or throw crockery but you will not laugh.It is an absolute stinker.Truly awful. I suppose that if you were a 15 year old boy living on a farm in rural Kentucky and were keen to see lots of slim young girls with bare midriffs (for no apparent reason) then it might serve some mildly pornographic purpose particularly if you were trying to retain those images for later reflection but if you are not within that demographic there is little other merit. Abysmal in almost every respect,it has only one redeeming quality which is why I watched it for almost an hour and that was to catch an occasional glimpse of the beautiful Sarah Lieving.I won't try to itemise its failings in detail; I'll just give you one scene as an example.There is a man and a woman (trying in vain to remember their lines and not look at the camera at the same time) in a room about 3 feet apart having a dreary and irrelevant conversation about something or other.When the camera is on him ,he looks as if he is being lit by a constipated firefly but when the camera switches to her,she seems to be standing under a 200 kilowatt searchlight.And so it goes on. What I don't understand(and perhaps someone with a greater understanding of the workings of Hollywood can enlighten me)is why anyone would make this dross.Surely no one could have expected to make any money out of it? If you are a wannabe working part-time at Walmart and looking for some recognition for your talents,you must realise that any association with films like these is going to flush the vestige of your career down the toilet? It feels to me like a giant Dunning-Kruger proving ground.Better to go upstairs and read your kids some stuff about dinosaurs or fairies;at least you will feel good about yourself.