Rating: C+
Dir: Mel Brooks.
Star: Leslie Nielsen, Mel Brooks, Peter MacNicol, Steven Weber.
My main surprise is, I didn’t hate this. Despite poor critical reaction, it’s a perfectly functional horror-comedy. If some way short of Brooks’ better work in the latter category, it works better as the former than expected. My main question is, how the hell was the cost for this thirty million dollars? I get offering Kelsey Grammer $3 million to play Dracula was expensive. But it’s the equivalent of a $65 million budget in 2026 dollars. Wherever that went, it’s not obviously on the screen, and the rest of the cast don’t seem expensive. Oh, well. It is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, albeit with tweaks. For instance, like in Dracula, it’s Renfield (MacNicol) rather than Jonathan Harker (Weber) who goes to Transylvania to see Count Dracula (Nielsen).
But in general, this hits most of the expected plot points. Dracula is clearly influenced by the Coppola version, especially in the hair – which is removable here. But Nielsen makes for quite a sympathetic vampire, who dreams of being able to walk in the sunshine and enjoy a drink of… wine. The main surprise might be Brooks who is genuinely good as Professor Van Helsing. He sells the concept of vampires well to Harker. Okay, he’s no Peter Cushing: then again, who is? Still, the sequence where the duo stake Lucy (a kinda hawt Lysette Anthony), releasing not one but two absolute gushers of blood (top), is awesome. In a 2013 interview, Brooks named it among his favorite all-time scenes – the only one he directed to make his list.
Speaking of Lucy, there may not be a better distillation of the theme of repressed, Victorian sexuality in Dracula, than this exchange between Harker and the newest vampire bride:
Lucy: Jonathan, let me kiss you. Let me show you the deep, raw passion of unbridled, sexual frenzy.
Jonathan: But, Lucy… I’m British.
Lucy: So are these.
This seems to be part of the film’s comedic philosophy: the women are all sexpots, and the men are all idiots. Anthony said later, “I was just meant to be there, with my tits hanging out, looking ridiculously glamorous. And, no, I didn’t find it offensive being that sort of sexy foil.”
It bombed on release, sits at an eleven percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is among the lowest-rated of all Brooks’ eleven movies on the IMDb. As a final movie, that might not exactly seem a great legacy, and given the cringeworthy title, I’d not blame anyone for avoiding it entirely. No Young Frankenstein, that’s for sure. However, I was still engaged considerably more than in Spaceballs. It helps that there’s enough going on beyond the comedy to sustain interest if the humour isn’t humourous enough. The set designs here are particularly impressive, and the performances do a better job of avoid the overacting and mugging which plagued Spaceballs. I guess if they needed that, they could have hired Keanu to reprise his character from the Coppola version.