Bram Stoker's Poffula

Who would have thought that Mel Brooks – the genius writer/director behind Blazing Saddles, History Of The World and Young Frankenstein (a successful comedy movie wholly in the vein of this failed one – pun intended) – would be prone to helming a comedy as pitifully appalling as Dracula: Dead And Loving It? One imagines that Brooks' comic radar is so finely-attuned that he would have seen through the financial and corporate layers of this film's drudgery and simply either abandoned it and cut his losses when he saw that it was not working, or salvaged the potential high points and let the cutting room floor eat the rest.

He did neither, which reveals that something is terribly askew in the Brooks universe. No longer is it "good to be the king" - Mel Brooks may well be a 2000 year-old man these days, his tastes no longer running congruent with his audience's; his comedy no longer as energetic or as biting as the wit of his youth (which, relatively speaking, was his late-40s anyway).

The Brooks gag formulas are definitely still there, but seem lazily inserted as dependable fallback material, rather than inspired stylistic substance. Jokes which I can imagine my 15-year-old self repeating ad nauseam in the schoolyard, now fall flat and wearisome on inured sensibilities.

Not only does the film suffer from rehashed and lazy gags, Brooks' direction lacks coherence and is oft-times merely cursory; there are wide shots, reverses and close-ups which serve no purpose, camera blandly flitting from one unnecessary shot to the next, not merely misdirecting our eye, but searching for subject matter to fill the frame judiciously. Many shots seem to be second-unit throwaway footage. Instead of easing back and letting the film's levity wash over me, as should have been the case, all these logistical details kept bugging my senses, detracting from the already-sparse humor.

During the cast-and-crew screening for this film, one has to wonder whether there were any genuine laughs or whether the aura of the director's past glories tainted the crew into believing that they had a good comedy on their hands, thereby eliciting perfunctory giggles out of respect for their elders.

In this film's adherence to the original Dracula story and noticeable neglect of comedic opportunities, not only did it fail as a good comedy, it becomes barely convincing as an A-List movie. Brooks did not need to re-make Dracula. Yet this seems to be all he did – in a manner inferior to that of droves of dramatic film-makers before him. Mel's strong suit is COMEDY. So why were we subjected to a film about the infamous psychotic blood-drinker, so loosely sprinkled with jokes that they seem incongruous within the context of the morbid tale? Where you would expect punchlines, there are scene-fades; where you would expect a gag, there is exposition of the Dracula legend; where you would expect laugh-out-loud-slapstick, there are strained attempts at re-capturing youthful insouciance from laurels past. And the dance sequence between Dracula and Mina was needless padding. (Makes you wonder what did make the cutting room floor.)

The actors vacillate between parodying Victorian characters and actually playing them. Harvey Korman's Dr. Seward can almost be an actual over-actor from one of the "real" Dracula movies, whilst Steven Weber's Jonathan Harker frequently comes across as an exaggerated English nobleman from a Christopher Lee film. Peter MacNichol, though, makes the perfect Renfield – for ANY Dracula film, serious or spoof - and is the only actor who truly nails his role in this blunt-toothed parody. Amy Yasbeck and Lysette Anthony are just too damn hot to be funny: all the self-deprecating melodrama in the world is not gonna help, chickie-babes - look at those racks!

On paper, Leslie Neilsen's Dracula seemed like a hilarious coup, as did Mel Brooks' Dr. van Helsing, but both seemed to be laboring under the specter of their own reputations as funnymen. Neilsen playing straight and being oblivious to his own humor is how he works best, but here he actively went for laughs, which means that even Brooks, as director, did not discern Neilsen's forte - or did discern it and chose to make Neilsen play against type anyway – either way, an erroneous decision. And Brooks' van Helsing seemed too self-aware of every mispronunciation he made - for the sake of schoolyard quotes - to be regarded as genuinely hilarious.

If Mel Brooks has grown so blind that he cannot see that the comedy boat has left him onshore; if he has become so oblivious to discernment that he actually thinks this film is noteworthy enough to be considered a vital "comedy," the movie's subtitle may well be applied to him – "Dead – And Loving It."

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