Bloody Hell!

There is one very provocative idea in DRACULA 2000 – all the rest is crap. The crap goes like this: In 2000, Dracula comes to New Orleans seeking the daughter of Van Helsing. Bland action movie ensues. Only redeeming factor is that every chick is groin-achingly hot.

The provocative idea is that Dracula is not a warrior impaler or a Count from Transylvania – he is the Apostle Judas Iscariot! More on this awesome audacity in a minute…

Gerard Butler is Dracula, Christopher Plummer is Van Helsing and Jonny Lee Miller is Van Helsing’s assistant, young action hero Simon.

Watching this movie in 2011 is confusing because we find ourselves rooting for the wrong stars, whose fortunes have seesawed since its release in 2000. Back then, Jonny Lee Miller was the hotboy, coming off the mind-scarring TRAINSPOTTING (1996) and the Victorian impertinence of PLUNKETT & MACLEANE (1999); while Gerard Butler was a handsome nobody with chiseled abs. Now Butler is the battle-worn Spartan, the Romantic Lead, the Man’s Man; while Miller has virtually abandoned the movie scene, slowly receding into TV wasteland, along with his hairline.

So when Miller pulls the action hero stunts here, snidely quips and turns up just in time to save damsels, we imagine Butler’s Dracula is going to make quick mincemeat of him and get down to the business of making women swoon with his Scottish brogue and chiseled abs. But Jonny gets the girl!

Van Helsing (Plummer) explains how he has tried for 100 years to kill “he who cannot be killed,” keeping himself alive by injecting himself with small doses of Dracula’s immortal blood. That’s why Dracula wants Van Helsing’s daughter, Mary (Justine Waddell) – she has vestiges of his blood in her. (Which makes us wonder, Why then, doesn’t he also want Van Helsing as another Teen Member of his Scooby Wagon? Sure, he wants to court Mary like a sensual lover, but both Mary and Van Helsing are equally repulsed by Dracula – why concentrate on bringing just the girl around? It’s probably easier to convince the old man to become a vampire, with promises of lustful tribades at his feet.)

To escape traps, Dracula can turn into a wolf, a bunch of tiny bats, or even liquid nitrogen fog. We are told how he detests all things Christian, like holy water, the crucifix and the Bible (Hey! *I* detest all things Christian too! Does that make me a vampire? How cool!), yet Simon cannot figure how silver – which kills vampires – figures into the equation.

Simon meets and vows to protect the perfect-featured Mary, who asks him, “Why are you doing this?” Oh, I dunno – maybe cos you’re hotter than a docker’s armpit! (Like any action hero, I sorely doubt he would be as protective of a 350-lb moose-face.)

When they confront him, Dracula fills in the Apostle backstory – and it’s the only interesting, original moment in the movie, as we see a flashback of Dracula as Judas at the Last Supper, then hanging himself, his 30 pieces of silver falling from his purse (SILVER!). As his body hangs in the noose – his eyes snap open.

Any Dracula aficionado will recognize familiar names and events at every turn, slightly tweaked to fit this bland reimagining; in lieu of storytelling, co-writers Joel Soisson and Patrick Lussier (also director) try to distract us with hotties at regular intervals, baring their fangs and promising to suck us dry – Jennifer Esposito‘s tousle of ass-length curls, Jeri Ryan‘s tight, voluptuous curves, Colleen Fitzpatrick‘s blond abandon, not to mention Justine Waddell’s innocent spinner schoolgirl smoothness. Does it work? What was the question again?

For someone who can’t be killed, Dracula is killed pretty easily, as he hangs by a cord from an arthouse crucifix, not dying, but not doing anything to escape either. Hey buddy, how about turning into those little bats or something? Nope – he just hangs there watching the sun rise, and dies flaming on like the Human Torch under its rays. It’s a long road to Sparta.

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Ingmar Bergman is spinning in the last grave on the left…

What pisses me off about THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is that nowhere do the filmmakers mention – not in advertising, not in screen credits and not even in the Special Features on the DVD – that this movie is ripped straight from Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING (1951, aka JUNGFRUKÄLLAN).

Instead, director Dennis Iliadis decides to give screen credit to Wes Craven, who created the “original” LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT in 1972: “Based on the story written and directed by Wes Craven.” No, it’s not. The story of villains who molest a young girl and then seek refuge unknowingly in the house of that girl’s parents was written by Ulla Isaksson. Craven rewrote the story to pander to American bloodthirstiness.

Bland Tony Goldwyn and blander Monica Potter are the parents. Sara Paxton is the virgin teen – so slim, smooth, innocent and sexy, only one thought crosses our minds: she just has to die. Martha MacIsaac (cutie Becca from SUPERBAD) is the pot-smoking teen friend.

Garret Dillahunt (looking like the sperm-child of Jason Patric, Rob Lowe and Dennis Miller) is the villain; his vaguely lesbian-goth chick, Riki Lindhome (who knows how to please viewing audiences by getting her cans out constantly); his teen son, Spencer Treat Clark (GLADIATOR, 2000), who is sickened by his father’s crimes and beaten for being so “unmanly.” Aaron Paul is Garret’s partner in crime.

Whereas Bergman’s film focused on the STORY, Iliadis’s film – like Craven’s before it – focuses on the GORY. Here, the parents of the molested child turn into the monsters they despise. In Bergman’s film, the father (Max von Sydow) dispatches the villains quickly and efficiently, like a god come to life, exacting justice; in Iliadis’s film, there’s mangling and bashing and stabbing and a claw hammer to the skull and microwaving someone’s head gratuitously – in effect, the parents become the “slashers,” an ironic twist on the teen-slaying genre.

In Bergman’s film, the father also kills the young kid in the gang of villains, who did not participate in the crime, but was an abettor for doing nothing to stop it. That was powerful stuff. With the gutless MPAA breathing down America’s neck, it is absolutely no surprise that young Spencer Treat Clark is spared here.

There seems to be no storyline in this movie, outside of Isaksson’s blatantly plagiarized premise. Isaksson’s story is altered by having the raped daughter somehow crawl back home, rather than her friend. And then a tenuous allusion to THE VIRGIN SPRING when the family realizes the quickest way to rush her to hospital is upriver by boat. But they can’t find the boat keys!

The script might have been just ten pages long with the amount of padding onscreen – the rape scene itself goes on and on for so long, it’s as if the director and editor just sat there touching themselves and letting it run. It’s not even tragic after a certain point – it’s just hot.

Further evidence that these filmmakers are just trying to gross us out: the father is a doctor; while he is putting stitches in a man’s nose, they have a blackout. The father takes a giant flashlight and – instead of shining it on the guy’s nose to finish his needle stroke – goes outside to fix the circuit breakers first, leaving the needle sticking half-through the nose. Some kind of doctor!

There is no characterization, no character arcs – the only throughline seems to be “trying to find the boat keys.”

This story opened deep, dark questions about the human condition: how far will you go to defend your loved ones?; how sweet can revenge be if you have to stoop to the level of the villains?; can you go through with taking a human life at all? And where the hell are those boat keys?! There is one scene where the father and mother exchange a glance that is laden with these unspoken conundrums, while they kill one of the villains… by mangling his hand in the sink and sticking a claw hammer in his head. Guess they figured the answers.

Then those questions get replaced by bigger ones, like “Where can I get psychiatric help?” as the father seems to slip into the Teen Slasher Movie world himself when we see him cutting open the ringleader’s back to sever his spinal column in order to paralyze him from the neck down, and then – while the ringleader is conscious – stick his head in a microwave and set it on high. Now that’s just plain wrong! Everyone knows the setting for human head is two minutes on ‘medium.’

It is a complicated, time-consuming procedure and we cannot quite tell chronologically when the father performs his insane little operation, but consider: if he did it BEFORE he rushed his raped daughter to the hospital, he is crazy; if he did it AFTER coming back from the hospital, he’s still crazy!

And the moral of the story is: Remember Where You Put The Boat Keys.

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A Craven effort.

The setup of RED EYE is thriller-worthy: a charming stranger (Cillian Murphy) insinuates himself into the good graces of a young woman traveling alone (Rachel McAdams) on a Red Eye flight from Dallas to Miami.

The exposition is dynamic: because she is virtually trapped in the airplane, seated beside him, the stranger’s beguiling attitude suddenly becomes very cold as he outlines a plot to her – he holds her father hostage (a very slim, very underused Brian Cox), to blackmail her into being complicit in the assassination of a senator.

But the denouement is dreary: like the Red Eye flight their characters spend most of the movie on, director Wes Craven and writers, Carl Ellsworth and Dan Foos have nowhere to go but down, as we once again realize that American senators DO NOT get assassinated in American movies of this weak-chested ilk. This is not an Oliver Stone or Clint Eastwood film – those guys can get away with almost anything – this is Wes Craven, the man who brought us THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), SWAMP THING (1982) and SCREAM (1996). No big leaps of bravura. Consequently, the outrageous assassination attempt (launching a rocket from a boat in the ocean to the penthouse suite of a hotel on the shore) reeks of desperation to inject the dragging plot with some kind of Van Damme-ish audacity.

But as the movie drags on, the longer it keeps going, the less and less it compels, until the last act’s obligatory and interminable Chase Sequences only serve to dull an already blunt climax.

Like reading this review, by the end of the movie, you find yourself asking, “Is that it?”

Yes. Yes it is.

END