Dracula 3000 DVD

...time. I do quite like Dracula movies and vampire movies in general, so when I spotted Dracula 3000 I thought it might be worth watching. It started Casper Van Dein who I quite liked in Starship Troopers, but haven't seen in a movie since. The rest of the cast wasn't overly inspiring but giving it the benefit of the doubt I sat down to watch it.

As a salvage ship flies through space it comes across a ship that went missing some 100 ...
...generally the normal type of Dracula story. Group of people go into a building/woods/spaceship and start to get picked off one by one. The plot doesn't offer anything that hasn't been seen in a Dracula film before, well apart from maybe the Spaceship. It's set in the future and it seems strange to think that technology doesn't seem to have advanced much as they are still using guns to defend themselves. The plot isn't the only problem with this film ... more

I've seen some pretty dire movies recently but this one has to be the worst one I've seen in a very long time. I do quite like Dracula movies and vampire movies in general, so when I spotted Dracula 3000 I thought it might be worth watching. It started Casper Van Dein who I quite liked in Starship Troopers, but haven't seen in a movie since. The rest of the cast wasn't overly inspiring but giving it the benefit of the doubt I sat down to watch it.

As a salvage ship flies through space it comes across a ship that went missing some 100 years earlier. Everyone on board had heard the stories about the ship but no one had expected to ever find it. The crew, led by Captain Abraham Van Helsing (Casper Van Dein), board the derelict ship in a hope of taking it back to earth and claiming the salvage money. What they find on the other ship is a different matter.

Having got the ship moving again they hear some strange noises as their own ship has been disengaged and left to drift into space. This leaves the crew stuck on this ship with no idea how their own ship came to be disengaged. They then find the captain's skeleton sat in his cabin holding a cross and pointing it towards the door. The next discovery has to be the most worrying though, in the cargo hold of the ship they find 50 long black coffins. Then things really start to go wrong….

The basis of the film is generally the normal type of Dracula story. Group of people go into a building/woods/spaceship and start to get picked off one by one. The plot doesn't offer anything that hasn't been seen in a Dracula film before, well apart from maybe the Spaceship. It's set in the future and it seems strange to think that technology doesn't seem to have advanced much as they are still using guns to defend themselves. The plot isn't the only problem with this film though; it's incredibly hard to find any positives about it, let alone a reason why I would recommend anyone to see it.

I really wasn't impressed by director, Darrell Roodt, who hasn't really made anything of note in the past. The direction seemed a bit stale and unimaginative. The start of the film held a little hope as he used it as a chance to introduce the crew one by one but from there it went rapidly down hill. The story was a combined effort between Roodt and Ivan Miborrow who had only worked in the sound department previously. The script and plot seemed to really be lacking and at times I couldn't have been any less interested in what was happening on the screen. The biggest problem I had with the whole story was that the Vampire wasn't even called Dracula, which didn't make any sense at all.

These directional problems also crept into the special effects. At times there were changes to use some decent effects and at least salvage something from the movie. They didn't and it seemed that the idea was to make the film on the smallest budget possible, probably because they'd blown it all on the cast. It seemed to be quite a dark set, presumably to try and set some kind of atmosphere, but even this failed to really add anything to the overall movie. There were a few comical moments throughout the film, but I get the feeling they weren't actually meant to be funny.

Then there is the cast. The only member of which I actually thought might be semi decent was Casper Van Dein, however even he was terrible. The interaction between characters was often flat and uninteresting. The rest of the cast was made up of Coolio, Erika Eleniak, Tom Lister and Langley Kirkwood to name but a few. All pretty Z list film stars but probably paid vast sums of money to star in this terrible film. None of the characters really stand out and instead of identifying with any of the characters, hoping they survive or Dracula kills them all, I just found myself not really caring.

Overall this has to be the biggest waste of time and money. At just over an hour and 40 minutes, you'd be much better going and finding another film. It's a real let down as far as Vampire movies go and offers nothing really interesting. I'm not sure if this has appeared in British cinemas or if it's going straight to video. I wouldn't recommend renting this, buying it or even watching it on TV unless you really, really want to put yourself through the torture of seeing it.

Amazon.co.uk Region 1 £5.40
 

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