Or Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness, according to this screenshot and absolutely nowhere else.
I wanted to celebrate my return after my August Hiatus with something solid. Or at the very least, something entertaining. And if you want a little peek into my thought process: I saw the cast of Dracula 3000 - Casper Van Dien, Erika Eleniak, Tiny "Zeus" Lister, and Coolio - and thought "I should probably watch this." Impulsive? Sure. And while Dracula 3000 is definitely a terrible movie, it flirts with being bad enough to almost be worth watching. It's not so bad it's good - but it's pretty close. It's kind of charming in how shitty it is... like a bad SyFy movie before they became self aware.
In the distant future (the year 3000!) a salvage ship captained by Abraham Van Helsing (Van Dien) cruises around deep space looking for abandoned spaceships. By the rules of some ambiguous federation, they are supposed to take the ships back to Earth (which is still a thing), but they get to keep everything onboard. They find a rad ship drifting in deep space with a bunch of potential - but find nothing on board but a bunch of coffins filled with sand. And then they get trapped on it, because why not. When Abraham Van Helsing checks out the captain's (Udo Kier!) log, he finds that the ship has been abandoned for fifty years and some terrible infection had taken over most of the crew. All of this happened after they visited Planet Transylvania (seriously), and apparently picked up some unwanted passengers. You can probably figure it out from there.
Honestly, this movie kind of feels like it was written by a child. Like they just had "space" and "Dracula" and that's all they needed. Nothing really makes all that much sense, and the "future" is comically underdeveloped - little bits and pieces of information are just dropped for no reason and with no payoff. (For example - apparently they outlawed Christianity at some point? I don't think you can just have that in your movie and then do nothing with it. Same with wood being very rare?) And while the exteriors and some of the ship looks okay, some of it is just brutally cheap. Parts of the spaceship are very clearly just large rooms - even in the year 3000, I'm guessing spaceships aren't going to have vaulted ceilings.
Oh, and Dracula - or Count Orlock, as he is known here - totally sucks. I'm not familiar with actor Langley Kirkwood, but he doesn't strike me as a good vampire. He's more of a rugged/athletic type, and just doesn't have the suaveness necessary to make Orlock work. He just seems kind of stupid and lost here. But I don't think it's really his fault - there's just so much incompetence surrounding the movie as a whole that just about anyone would have had a hard time. And while he's not very good, he's the least of the movie's problems.
One big problem? The Coolio vampire (yep - the only one who really gets turned for any significant amount of time) gets more screen time than the big bad Orlock. And regardless of if you like Coolio or not - he's just not a good vampire. Plus, co-writer/director Darrell Roodt tries to make him a "funny" vampire - so he makes lots of jokes about weed and wanting to have sex with second in command Aurora Ash (Eleniak). It's head-shakingly bad and an embarrassing miscalculation.
But the biggest problem (and probably why it fails so bad) is the lack of any significant blood or suspense. You expect there to be at least a little blood-letting in a goddamned space-vampire movie, but just about everything here happens offscreen. So I guess if the story is insultingly bad I at least expect there to be a little blood to tide you over. But not in Dracula 3000. And what little "action" there is is so poorly choreographed/shot that you end up just not caring.
But all this negativity aside, I'm still kind of glad I watched it. It's strange - it's just not that often that you come across a film that is so brazenly stupid. The story somehow manages to be simple and not make sense at the same time, and some of the choices the actors make are just bizarre and often cringe-worthy. And, you do get a not-totally-embarrassing performance from Erika Eleniak and a surprising turn from Tiny "Zeus" Lister. He's not amazing or anything, but he's charismatic enough and pretty clearly the star of Dracula 3000. He's probably the most *legitimately* entertaining thing about the film, but for some reason he only gets fifth or sixth billing everywhere you look.
But my favorite thing about the film is the dull thud that it ends with. I have honestly never seen an ending that just screams either (a) "we ran out of money and don't care" or (b) "you've already made it this far... and we just don't really care." It's a staggeringly bad ending that's so terrible it kind of partly redeems the film in a weird way.
That's just for me though. While I found it partly enjoyable, I couldn't actually recommend Dracula 3000 to anyone. It's really a bad, bad movie. And when you look at that cast and know it's a really cheap "space Dracula" movie, I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise.
I would not recommend this film.
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