Dracula: The Original Living Vampire – Film Review

Detective Amelia Van Helsing (Christine Prouty) is on the desperate hunt for the killer responsible for a string of grisly murders targeting young women. Matters only worsen when all evidence leads to the seemingly untouchable Count Dracula (Jake Herbert). And when Van Helsing’s girlfriend vanishes, she is forced to question the very existence of monsters in a final showdown with the enigmatic count.

Okay, so it may only be January, meaning that we still have eleven more months left in the year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Maximilian Elfeldt‘s Dracula: The Original Living Vampire remains one of the worst movies of the year by the time December rolls around. It’s an extremely embarrassing display of bad dialogue and is absolutely chalked full of terrible one-liners that I’m sure were meant to sound cool and funny, but they end up falling flat every time.

This movie kind of reminds me of an edgier Disney Channel Original movie in all the worst ways imaginable. The screenplay here… I mean, what screenplay? Every single scene in this movie feels like it was just kind of filmed on the spot without any prior planning. I just picture all of the actors and the filmmakers on set scratching their heads, asking “Okay, so what do we want to have happen next?”.

All of the characters here are also tragically underdeveloped. Why in the world does Amelia Van Helsing come across as the most annoyingly bland and uninteresting character in this story? She should have been a deeply intriguing, multi-layered character with tons of complex character arcs, but no, instead, we get one of the most forgettable movie characters of the year.

And don’t even get me started on how awful this iteration of Dracula is. He just kind of looks like… some random guy. He doesn’t look intimidating at all and it sort of seems as if the director just hired a random actor simply because he thought he looked charming or something. Dracula is a character that’s supposed to be creepy and uncomfortable to even look at. Just staring into those piercing yellow eyes should cause goosebumps to prickle over your arms. This version of Dracula, however, is going to make you laugh, and not in any way the director intended.

Dracula: The Original Living Vampire is one of those absolutely insane movies that you genuinely do have to see to believe. I know that term gets tossed around a lot and it can be annoying, but I truly mean it when I say that I’ve never seen something so strange before. The tagline on the poster reads “The classic tale as you’ve never seen” – it’s a true statement, but honestly, I’d rather not have seen this disaster.