A literary and cinematic horror-rich character long sustaining on the plasmatic coagulate of tasty souls - Count Dracula - gets slapdash type B-movie treatment from guerrilla filmmaker, writer, director, and producer Michael Feifer. Results have one-stop-shopping Feifer doing his best to collect straight to DVD coin by conjuring author Bram Stoker’s public domain-ed name.
Gothic horror connoisseurs are forewarned. Put in contemporary terms, this ain’t Francis Ford Coppola’s legendary vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) — a film with steadfast Gary Oldman playing the Count, being received well by fans and critics alike and doing moderate box office business. Fifteen years later Feifer stretches the financial limits of his anemically budgeted period piece. The director’s “creative” ambition is wildly incongruous with the material’s interpretive atmospheric demands. Made for under $1 million, the movie has The Blair Witch Project’s (1999) amateurish visual accoutrements. Blair’s uneven home-video graininess served its utilitarian purpose because of the movie’s high concept — a video tape left behind by a group of young adults who all mysteriously disappeared. Feifer’s film is more a case of low concept and low technology tempered with race to the marketplace speed, all better suited to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am talkies of the early 1930s, a lá Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931). If an obscure sweat factory located in the darkest, dankest of isolated communist third world countries were to churn out movies like its socks and dinner plates, this is what they would look like.
Set in London, England, but (laughably) filmed south of London, California (pop. 1,848), Count Dracula (Andrew Bryniarski, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, 2006) is looking for a deal on some real estate — he wants a castle to call home. The shroud surrounding the monster's motives are quickly eschewed (the movie is a user friendly 86 minutes) when he makes the acquaintance of a love distraught Elizabeth (Kelsey McCann, Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck), who’s been forbidden contact with her one true love, Bram (Wes Ramsey, TV’s Charmed and The Guiding Light), by her thespian-challenged father (Dan Speaker). (Feifer combined three Stoker short stories into one movie and then inserted the author himself as the hero).
Article comments
1 - TED
Regarding Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest. So bad
that I believe that it will never even make it to
camp stage. The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes has been moved up 100 points with this film's introduction.