Review by Ben Bussey
About twenty minutes into this film, I found myself wishing I’d taken a leaf out of Annie’s book and attempted this one as an as-it-happens review, much as she did with Adam Chaplin recently. As this slightly oddball, clearly cut-price attempt to capture the Dracula prequel market on DVD prior to the release of Universal’s big budget Dracula Untold later this year (no, it’s not an Asylum production, but the thought process is clearly much the same) I knew that an ancestor of Abraham Van Helsing was bound to show up at some point. Along comes the moment of his entrance, and first off all we hear is a ridiculously hammy, clearly affected Romanian accent, and slowly the figure emerges from the shadows, revealing himself to be a man of clearly advanced years dressed like a cross between Baron Munchausen and Dick Turpin with what appears to be a prosthetic hook nose and a massive handlebar moustache and OH JESUS CHRIST IT’S JON FUCKING VOIGHT!
Really, Jon Voight? Really? Why? How? Please tell me this is one of those “I happened to be on vacation nearby and it was only a few days work” deals, like how they reportedly drafted Harrison Ford into The Expendables 3. I mean, okay, all the old greats seem to star in nothing but complete shit these days, but… you know… it tends to be complete shit that plays in cinemas and presumably pays quite well, at least. I’m sure Transformers, the National Treasure movies and even Anaconda paid old Jon handsomely whilst taxing him very little as an actor. You only need to look at the cover art of Dracula the Dark Prince to know that this isn’t in remotely the same budgetary range, so I guess we’re to assume either Voight really desperately needed a little money, and/or he really had nothing better to do that week. Or, I don’t know, maybe he had a great burning desire to play Van Helsing; to follow in the footsteps of Van Sloan, Cushing, Olivier, Hopkins, Jackman (ahem), Hauer (ahem ahem), and bring that most iconic of vampire slayers to life. Or, in this case, something like the great-grandfather of the iconic vampire slayer. Whilst wearing a huge moustache and a false nose. I was half waiting for him to tell us, “no, it’s spelt Van Helsing, but it’s pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove.” (Just google it if you don’t get it.)
Having said all that: is Dracula the Dark Prince the utterly worthless waste of time you’re no doubt anticipating? You bet your sculpted buttocks it is. Midway through, my missus walked into the room and asked, “are you watching Merlin?” And that pretty much says it all. It’s a slightly extended episode of a BBC fantasy series, with a smidgen more blood and a few gratutitous tit shots thrown in. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of half-baked, sloppily-assembled crap we’ve long since come to expect from the direct-to-DVD market, and you can find spend more productive ways to spend 90 minutes scrubbing the underside of your toilet basin. But you know what… for what it is, I actually didn’t mind. Yup, it’s another of those “it’s shit, but not shit shit” deals. While I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to go to any trouble to see the damn film, it’s not without entertainment value if you’re in a really, really, really undemanding mood.
Anyway, plot… we start out on a little prologue of mortal Dracula (Luke Roberts) as a good Christian soldier hacking up the Turks in the time-honoured fashion, only to renounce God when he returns home to find his wife slain. Yeah, basically it’s the prologue of Coppolla’s Dracula, realised on the about the same budget that paid for Sadie Frost’s corsets. Skip forward a hundred years, and Dracula is sitting pretty on his Game of Thrones-ish throne while his right hand man/pimp Renfield (Stephen Hogan) keeps the guest rooms stocked up with scantily-clad suck toys. Meanwhile, he sends out his heavily armoured goons in big horned helmets to terrorise the land in a typically evil fashion, in search of a Biblical artefact which he can use to bring back the dead – or, in the hands of his enemies, could spell his destruction. But whaddya know, among the forces assembled to take him down is Alina (Kelly Wenham, who astonishingly was on Merlin once), who is the spitting image of Dracula’s century-dead bride. Taking her prisoner, the Dark Prince tries to find if any of the soul of his lost love remains – and in the process, wouldn’t you know it, she comes to realise he’s not so much totally and utterly evil as he is misunderstood.
Once again – yes, it’s absolute unmitigated crap. But it’s hard to be completely down on a movie which boasts seven foot black knights in horned helmets, warrior maidens in tight, impractical looking outfits, and excessively horny Gothic castles that look like they came out of a Playstation One. The ‘reimagining’ of the Count’s vampiric origins as rooted in Old Testament mythology is naturally a bit ham-fisted, but Dracula the Dark Prince is hardly the first or worst offender in this regard. And sure, it really isn’t much of a horror movie, more a kind of Gothic fantasy adventure with just enough raunch and violence to guarantee a 15 certificate – but hey, cheapo sword and sorcery is fun too.
So yes – once again – Dracula the Dark Prince is complete pants. You need never lose a wink of sleep over missing it, and by no means should you go to pains to track it down unless you really have an excess of time and money on your hands. Still, if it should so happen to cross your path and you don’t have anything especially pressing on your agenda – honestly, there are worse ways to flush an hour and a half of your precious life down the crapper.
Dracula the Dark Prince is available now on Region 2 DVD from Kaliedoscope.