Surprisingly FUNNY BUT SHALLOW

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2008)

When you want to make one more film on Dracula who counts several hundred films already, both as assets and as drawbacks, you have to be original. No problem ! Let's patchwork together dozens of allusions to other films and create the first ever vampiristic salad. So Dr Frankenstein and his creature will be there. The use of the lightning to get electricity like in Back to the Future 1. The use of strange weapons halfway between Back to the Future 3 and The Lord of the Rings. The costume, dress, apparel of Van Helsing looks like Clint Eastwood's in a spaghetti western, and at times like the main hero's in the Matrix trilogy. The cows in the village are similar to those in Salem's Lot 2. Even the dance scene with the vampire reflected in a half empty mirror is borrowed from Dance of the Vampires. I would need a volume to quote them all. So what's left after all that composing of tidbits? A superhero Van Helsing who kills Dracula's three fiancées, the thousands of baby vampires that look like upside down Aliens in their suspended pods, and Dracula himself. And all that on the order from the Vatican, the Pope and the good old godly Catholic church. That's a counter-allusion to the Da Vinci Code. The film then is more dictated in its plot by the brand new topnotch state of the art digitalized image processing of the modern world than the reverse. So the plot is a vast ballet between mountains and from abysses to cosmic skies. It is thus an amusing entertainment as shallow as the Thames River twenty kilometers before its spring. Or is it the Mississippi river? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines