'I Dream of Dracula' (2003) is somewhat erroneously titled, since the pair of darkly draped, charcoal-lipped vampires in troubled Priscilla's (Michelline Shafranski) twitchy, handheld B/W fever dream are undeniably female, with one pallid, especially suck-able succubus bodaciously blessed with the pulchritudinous dimensions of a youthful Brigitte Lahaie, so perhaps it should more realistically read 'I Dream of Jean Rollin movies', as Jim Haggerty's fitfully amusing, made-for-bupkis, zero-frills, moderately fleshly thrills, written by a roomful of mashed up monkey's project has about as much to do with Bram Stoker as Keanu Reeves British accent, and while 'I Dream of Dracula' rarely looks or sounds better than an equally grungy, skinflint skin-flick, you gotta' admire the sizable chutzpah of Haggerty deliberately aggregating so many monotonous-sounding individuals without one measly mote of acting ability between them in this heroic attempt to breathe a minim of sentience into his flaccid, pseudo-Gothic hokum about the increasingly neurotic travails of dizzy-headed Priscilla discovering that the truth about her oft-repeated, frequently shown dream sequence would ultimately lead to so much execrable acting, gratuitous, not entirely displeasing nudity, some truly risible death throes and a hugely distracting 'score' which sounded suspiciously like the pre-set demo song on a vintage Casio Pt-1 keyboard!
The brain-needling fact that all of this lugubrious, Z-grade daftness could in any way be this entertaining is perhaps the not implausible suggestion that 'I Dream of Dracula' might simply be an elaborate hoax or skeezey succubi satire, a theorem given considerable verisimilitude by the protean, Beastie Boy's level absurdity of Pricilla's adulterous husband's dime-store Sopranos wig, which demonstratively steals every scene that it appears in!
While part of me is genuinely appalled that I enjoyed this arrant nonsense as much as I did, fortunately the better part of me found it to be sublimely ridiculous and not infrequently hilarious, how could anyone not warm to a film liberally festooned with lines like: 'Satan, I presume?' and personal favourite, 'The Evil's gone from here...' 'Well, as long as she doesn't bring another fruit cake!' 'Ba-Dum-Tss!'
Review of I Dream of Dracula
