There are plenty of reasons why this movie could had been a real fun one and a bit of a cult-classic even. It has the right premise and settings, as well as the right cast for it. I mean, David Carradine as Dracula and Bruce Campbell as Van Helsing, set in a small rural town in 'modern' day America, how could things go wrong? The answer is very simple unfortunately; the script.
It's really disappointing how incredibly lame and poorly the story got written. The right ideas were there it seemed but yet they didn't really had an idea how to use them. The story feels like it's all constant buildup, without ever a decent pay off. It's such an uninteresting done story, in which all of the characters also don't work out at all. All of the characters motivations remain unclear to me really. I had no idea what Dracula wanted or what Van Helsing was trying to achieve and why the Harrison's are the centerpiece of the movie remains also quite unclear. It all still starts of promising enough but the movie starts to run out of steam pretty fast and there is far too little good, original or interesting happening in the story.
The comedy of the movie is typically '80's like, even though it's an 1990 movie (though some sources say it's an 1989 movie). This means that the comedy is quite simplistic and childish really, which more often makes the movie lame than funny really. And that for me was the movie its downfall. I mean I could had so easily forgiven the movie for all of its weaknesses, if only the movie was a more fun and funny one to watch.
I love vampires and all, as long as they don't sparkle but there for me was very little to enjoy in this movie. The movie might just as well had been one about zombies, or nuclear affected freaks and the movie would had been all the same really. Not even David Carradine could impress me much as count Dracula. There is simply very little typical vampire stuff going on in this movie and most of the well known actors also get heavily underused. I still thought it was great that David Carradine played the famous count. A role that his father John Carradine had played more than a few times during his career, also in a couple of official Universal studio movies and who had died just a few years prior to this movie. As far as I know if this was the only time David Carradine played the blood sucking count. Perhaps he did it as an homage to his, at the time, recently deceased father.
There is a very good reason why this movie isn't known any better really; it's very forgettable.
5/10
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