...and that's a goddamn shame! Please make the sun rise and have it incinerate all copies of Dracula 3000. This must be the WORST vampire-flick of the new millennium so far (I haven't seen REIGN IN DARKNESS yet, but they don't get much worse than this). Don't be fooled be the movie's cool H.R. Gigeresque cover. This is so bad, it's almost hilarious. I can't describe all the emotions this movie conjured. I laughed my ass off, I yelled at the screen, I sat there numb, nodding my head in disbelief,... This film has 'cheap & cheese' written all over it. The best thing of this movie are the opening-credits and the opening-shots which feature more or less okay CGI of two space-ships. But when Casper Van Dien's voice-over comes on, you start smelling something fishy. And, indeed, it all goes downhill rapidly after that.

The crew of a salvage-spaceship finds an abandoned vessel, the Demeter, which seems to be heading for earth. They enter it, thus sealing their fate. This movie is, above all things, a shameless low-budget ALIEN-rip-off, mixed with vampires. Right down to the plot-twist were Erika Eleniak's character, Aurora, reveals she's a robot. Coolio goes badly over-the-top as the dope-smoking, bloodsucking 187 (pffff, code from the hood as a name?!?!). Casper Van Dien's character's named Capt. Van Helsing (hahaha!) and he looks like...,er well, Casper Van Dien. Udo Kier as Capt. Varna, former commander of the Demeter, is only shown on a monitor-screen and he really does seem to have trouble reading his lines from an auto-cue (poor Udo, what where you doing in this flick?). And then we have Langley Kirkwood as count Orlock, one of the most pathetic and laughable Dracula's ever to (dis)grace the silver screen. Just look at his outfit. Instead of some cool-looking futuristic black suit or something, he's wearing a cheap old-school Halloween-suit with fringes. You thought Richard Roxburgh was unconvincing as Dracula in VAN HELSING? Then wait until you see Langley's performance!

The set-designers went overboard on this one. The interior of the Demeter looks like a cross between an oil-tanker and an old steel-factory, which they decorated with awful lights and colors like green, pink, blue and yellow. The prop-master must have forgotten that this movie takes place in the year 3000, because the characters use guns which look like today's .45 magnums and "Prof" uses a non-motorized, non-floating wheelchair. It has to be pushed around in order to move.

Aside from one dried-up corpse, a few impalements and one dismemberment there's absolutely no gore. And the vampire-fangs and contact-lenses look fake as hell. Add to that also the most lame, stupid and abrupt ending ever: Humvee and Aurora are the only survivors. Instead of having one final (bloody) showdown with count Orlock, they lock themselves in the control-room. Then Aurora explains that before her program was upgraded and joining narcotics, she used to be a "Protheus 3.2 PB", in other words: a pleasure-bot. So she says "Well then, what are you waiting for". Humvee answers "Ain't gotta tell me twice. Come on, girl", picks her up and... "BOOOOOOM!!!" the ship explodes and credits roll. No sex-scene, no Erika flashin' her boobies, no bloody climax,... Just one more shot of Udo Kier reading a line on the monitor and it's over.

So, this movie is a must-see for every bad-movie-lover, but I must warn them: It gets really painful at times. And everyone claiming that VAN HELSING, UNDERWORLD or even QUEEN OF THE DAMNED is the worst vampire-movie of the new millennium clearly is insane, or just hasn't seen Dracula 3000 yet.
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