Today’s review was prompted by three recent events. First, Halloween season is underway so I thought about looking at something appropriately spooky. The second event was the theatrical re-release of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic Alien, which prompted me to review yet another low-budget Alien wannabe. Finally, the cancellation of a convention I planned to attend in September called VampCon Chicago inspired me to examine something related to vampires. Put that all together and you’ve got my analysis of a certain substandard, sanguinary space adventure: 2004’s Dracula 3000. Although this is one of many incredibly loose adaptations of Bram Stoker’s highly influential 1897 horror novel Dracula, this low-budget space thriller has some interesting aspects that are buried underneath the layers of shoddy filmmaking.

Look at you, movie. A pathetic story of junk and kitsch.

Helmed and co-written by Oscar-nominated South African filmmaker Darrel Roodt (Sarafina!), the one major theme from the original story that Dracula 3000 truly understands is the idea of learning from the past to preserve the future. By setting the film in the distant future and establishing that religion is all but forgotten in the year 3000, that notion is able to be demonstrated in a unique way, especially through Udo Kier’s character of a starship captain who survives the slaughter of his crew at the hands of the vampiric Count Orlock by holding on to a crucifix. Even though he has almost no interactions with an adequate main cast that includes former wrestler and Fifth Element star “Tiny” Lister, Baywatch’s Erika Eleniak and Casper Van Dien of Starship Troopers fame, Kier’s eerie performance gives the film a little bit of prestige that transcends the cookie-cutter used future aesthetic and cliched storytelling and balances out the campier elements, such as rapper Coolio’s broad and unrestrained turn as a character that can best be described as a stoned Renfield. Surprisingly, the weakest link in the cast is Langley Kirkwood’s stale, charisma-deficient portrayal of Orlock. He does a decent job and I wasn’t expecting the second coming of Bela Lugosi but his distinct lack of menace or charm is very evident, which isn’t helped by Roodt’s frustratingly inconsistent direction, which often changes from scene to scene. Some scenes feel like they were guided by a bargain-bin Ridley Scott while others feel like stuff that Friedberg and Seltzer would reject.

Disappointing antagonist and weird tonal issues aside, Dracula 3000 is an decent slice of sci-fi horror cheese that could have used a little more time to sort out the story it’s trying to tell. If you’re a Dracula completist, this is worth at least one viewing.

Credit: totoqro