Meadhall of the Comitatus

The war rages on….vampires against zombies. The last battle involved a lot of running up and down an alley, this one involves running up and down a hallway. Oh, the excitement! This one has a slight edge over the competition, though, since it’s IN SPACE. Wow!

That Coolio sure does like to get high.

Premise: 2/5

You might be tempted to believe that the whole premise of this movie is an overly long credits sequence with I guess it’s supposed to be blood dripping or swirling, something. It is not. Nor is this movie about an overlong introduction which consists of each character’s Official-Looking ID and Space Junker License(tm) staying on the screen while the captain blabs on and on about their personalities, job specialties, and how many fucking cats they have or whatever—since, you know, the RAW INTENSITY of the action to follow might render you so stupid that figuring out who these characters are on your own will become impossible. No indeed! And despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, this movie is also not about how many times you can see the same 5 characters run up and down the aforementioned hallway.

What IS this movie about, then? I’m glad you asked! See, it’s about Dracula—only in SPACE! See, if you somehow missed it before during the “character bios” part of our movie, Captain Abraham van Helsing and his crew have just stumbled upon a huge ship, the Demeter, abandoned and heading on a direct course for Earth. Since it’s a derelict and still outside the “New World” jurisdiction, the crew are fully within their rights to salvage anything of value on the ship. While they’re going about doing this, Udo Kier keeps interrupting the movie to narrate on his captain’s log about the epidemic gripping the crew and so forth. This is the only thing that elevates the premise an extra point, because even though it’s been years, I still remember how, when I was a kid, that scene creeped me out from the book Dracula where the “ghost ship” lands in England. Call it nostalgia, but I thought that was a fun concept to turn into a sci-fi vampire flick. Of course, what the movie gets from me from that is in danger of being taken back when we find out that the Demeter was carrying cargo from the planet “Transylvania” in the “Carpathian galaxy.” As if that wasn’t cringeworthy enough, one of the two females is named Mina. I can just about forgive the captain being van Helsing, since the characters themselves remark on what an odd coincidence it is as they’re researching vampires, and don’t believe it necessarily has any meaning really. But PLEASE. Draw the line somewhere. There’s tribute and homage, and then there’s regurgitating anything you can from the book in a fanboy rush to prove you’ve got cred.

There’s some more running up and down, some vampire attacks, some vampires being attacked, and then an ending so willfully dumb that you can only laugh and shake your head.

"How come we never talk anymore, honey?"

Cast: 2/5

Fortunately there really is only 8 characters in the whole movie, and the after-credits sequence sure seemed to think they were important, so let’s run down the list, shall we?

1. Casper Van Dien – Capt. Abraham von Helsing. He’s Casper van Dien. You’ve seen him play this role in Starship Troopers, only with more depth. And yes, that’s as lame as it sounds.
2. Erika Eleniak – Aurora Ash. The second-in-command sure likes making cute faces at the camera, although she waivers between going for the sex appeal and being an Ice Queen, and doesn’t do either all that well. In order to add apparent depth to this character beyond the depth of her cleavage, the writers gave her a dirty secret. And fortunately, the dirty secret doesn’t involve her having a penis. No….she is OMG t3H ROBO HAWTIE! Poor drac’s down one juicebag.
3. Coolio – 187. His whole character revolves around saying “Dude!” a lot and talking about getting high, looking for weed, or in fact getting high. Later on he’s about the least menacing homicidal vampire ever, and would look more at home in a cartoon. Only it would have to be a cartoon with weed.
4. Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld – Mina (I TOLD you!). She’s pretty, has an accent, and pigtails. Other than that, she pretty much freaks out and dies.
5. Grant Swanby – “The Professor.” He’s British, is in a wheelchair, and whines and bitches endlessly. Also, I really wanted to slap the fuck out of him or throw him down a set of stairs.
6. Langley Kirkwood – Orlock. Gayest. Vampire. Ever. And I include Anne Rice novels when I say this.
7. Tommy “Tiny” Lister – “Humvee.” He’s big and black. Every plot point or joke involving him centers on this, and that’s ALL. He’s also one of those characters whose motives and actions change on a dime. Taking shortcuts during script-writing hurts everyone.
8. Udo Kier – Capt. Varna. His is the only dialogue that ever keeps to anything like logical consistency, even though he’s pretty much just a floating head on the screen. For what it’s worth, it serves its purpose.

Coolio is breaking into those coffins to try and find some weed. That sounds like a joke, but I swear it's not. AND that's how he reawakens Dracula. Thank you very much, movie.

Technical: 3/5

Nothing really exceptional one way or the other in this department. 1 point lost because of the goddamn hallway and the fact that the engine room is clearly shot in the grungy basement of an apartment building somewhere. For a cheapjack movie, though, the special effects and space stuff don’t look horrible. Call it a wash, then.

What Dracula movie would be complete without this scene? Even if it's IN SPACE.

Popcorn Factor: 3/5

Thank your Carpathian gods that this movie is short! An hour and twenty is all you have to sit through, and much longer than that would put you at a serious hanging risk. I *think* that this movie is campy on purpose, just given the completely silly premise, but the problem is that I’m not 100% sure that it isn’t just awful. I mean, for every kinda funny line delivered in a funny way (Humvee – “Excuse me for saying, but all this blood-sucking stuff, that’s some white people shit, right?”) you get some dialogue that lame doesn’t even begin to describe (witness: the scene near the beginning in which van Helsing is concerned for Mina so he asks her over their headsets whether she’s okay, she says she is, so he next asks Humvee who’s with her if she’s okay, he says she’s fine, so he asks again if she’s okay, and Mina answers him again, and then finally von Helsing asks Humvee AGAIN if she’s okay). Really, there’s so much flagrant disregard for logic on display in this movie that it’s either going headlong for campy cliches, or the director is struggling to fill up his hour twenty runtime any way possible. And as I mentioned, the ending is so abrupt and . . . honestly, I can’t even figure out how to describe it. It involves an explosion just about right after a “come hither” kind of flirty conversation between two of the characters, and the juxtaposition pretty much cracked me the hell up out of the blue. Is it good? Hell no, but if your expectations are low enough you should definitely be amused by at least some of the lowbrow stuff on display here.