#we're encountering how wildly weird my ranking system is in this one

[spacetrashpile]

DRACTOBER DAY 3: DRACULA 2000

Welcome back to Dractober, where I watch and rank one film adaptation of Dracula for every day in October! I'll be ranking each film on two one to ten scales (was it a good adaptation of Dracula and did I enjoy it?) and giving the film a final score at the end by averaging out the other scores.

Today's film is Dracula 2000, released in, who could've guessed it, 2000. This movie is executive produced Wes Craven, known for being the man behind the Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, but (despite what the marketing and title will tell you) he actually had very little to do with the film as a whole. It follows a Count Dracula who has been let loose on the modern day, specifically in New Orleans. He's on a search for a women who shares his blood, and has been born, not made, to be like him. I could get more into specifics, but I'll try and save the spoilers for the review itself.

Let's get into it!

Well, here we are, the first film on my list that I did not enjoy. I knew it was coming eventually, and it coming with the first film that was actually trying to be a Dracula adaptation and that presented itself as such makes a lot of sense. So, let's answer our first question, was this a good adaptation of Dracula?

This film presents itself from the outset as an actual adaptation of Dracula. We open with a shot of the remains of the Demeter, before we promptly cut forward to the year 2000, and the office of Matthew Van Helsing, a collector of antiques, and his assistant, Simon Sheppard. Thieves break into Matthew's shit to steal a sealed coffin he keeps in the basement, convinced that it's got? Treasure? Or something? It's unclear on what they were specifically looking for, just that they believed it was valuable.

Turns out, that's Dracula's coffin! The entire crew gets attacked as they travel with the coffin by plane to the US. They're all killed, and their plane crashes in the bayou of Lousianna. This is our modern day Demeter crew, except they all also become vampires, and the only woman also becomes one of our stand ins for the brides. Van Helsing travels to America to follow Dracula's trail, and is followed by Simon in turn. Simon is kind of our Steward and kind of our Jonathan.

In New Orleans live two roommates, Mary and Lucy. Mary has had nightmares her entire life of a guy who we know to be Dracula, and Lucy- who's full name is Lucy Westenra!- is her friend who suffers the same fate as book Lucy but with way less screen time </3.

All our main characters come together when Dracula arrives in New Orleans to hunt down Mary. Unfortunately, this leans into one of my least favorite things that Dracula adaptations like to do- making Mina (who Mary is a stand in for) into someone particularly special to Dracula to justify her obsession with her. Thankfully, this film doesn't choose to make her his reincarnated lover (my least favorite variation of this trope). What it does do, however, is much weirder.

Matthew Van Helsing is actually Abraham Van Helsing, who first encountered Dracula back when Bram Stoker was alive, and indirectly inspired Stoker's novel. However, Dracula, unlike the other vampires, cannot be killed by any means (that Van Helsing has discovered). After capturing and subduing Dracula, Van Helsing vowed he would live as long as Dracula did, until he uncovered a way to kill him. He's stayed alive this long by injecting himself with Dracula's blood, which he's been extracting from him via leeches.

OKAY?????

The departures this movie takes from the original novel only get weirder from here. Van Helsing establishes early on that Dracula (and the other vampires) don't actually experience a real aversion to the cross or other symbols of God, but that Dracula just really, really hates Catholicism. Keep that in mind. The only ways the vampires can be killed, by this movie, are by stabbing them in the heart or cutting off their head, and they have a sensitivity to silver. Keep that in mind as well.

We then go through a whole lot of movie that I'm not gonna summarize here for the sake of brevity, but Dracula collects his three brides, one of whom is Lucy, and also kills Van Helsing. Sad! We do get one moment of book accuracy here, with Dracula briefly turning into his big dog form to hunt down Mary. Yay!

Eventually, we reach the climax of the movie, when Dracula kidnaps Mary and Simon gets kidnapped by the brides (only after he kills one of them, though). Now that Mary's in his grasp, Dracula decides to reveal to her his backstory, and who he was before he was a vampire.

With all the things you know so far, I want you to guess what historical figure they made be Dracula. There are more hints present in the movie that I didn't touch on, but let's see if you can get it.

Did you guess JUDAS ISCARIOT? BECAUSE I SURE DIDN'T WHEN I STARTED THIS MOVIE.

This also falls into another trap that adaptations of Dracula tend to fall into. They think that Dracula is the main character of the story, or at least that he should be, so they try to give him some backstory or tragic motivation or something to make him land more as a protagonist. I hate when this happens!

The movie ends with Mary killing Lucy and Simon killing the remaining bride, and Mary getting into a fight with Dracula. Eventually, she realizes she can kill him by hanging him, as Judas Iscariot did when he killed himself. She hangs him off the side of the building they were fighting on, and he releases her from her vampirism before bursting into flames in the sunrise. You might remember that Dracula doesn't burn in the sunlight in the original novel, but frankly, this is like, the smallest slight this film has against it.

Now, back to the question at hand. Ranking this one as a Dracula adaptation is surprisingly difficult with the parameters I've previously given myself. I gave Evil of Dracula, which wasn't really a Dracula adaptation of all, a 6/10 due to it grasping the actual spirit of the novel and the characters pretty solidly. In hindsight, this was WAY TOO HIGH, but I'm gonna stick with it. But here's the thing- the previous two films on this list weren't really trying to be adaptions. Van Helsing wasn't trying, and had nothing to do with the novel at all, and Evil of Dracula wasn't trying, but it captured the spirit of the novel for the most part. Dracula 2000 was trying to be a Dracula adaptation, if a looser one in order to put in the modern day.

But I think it failed to do so in an actually interesting or effective way. It leans into some of my least favorite failings for a Dracula adaptation, as mentioned above, and anything that could've actually been interesting about the way this film adapts the story is overridden by the absolute craziness of it or the wildly underwhelming nature of the film itself (I'll get into that).

Mainly, I think this film fails to understand what makes Dracula what it is- our main characters. It's fine if we don't have direct one to ones of the main characters, I can live with that for the sake of moving the story into the modern day or making the plot a bit less convoluted (by cutting the whole suitors thing, for example). But the main characters of this film barely interact. We get maybe two scenes of Mary and Lucy interacting before Lucy dies, we never see Mary and Van Helsing interact despite their relationship, and Simon and Mary don't start interacting consistently until half the main cast is dead. Dracula is undeniably the main character here, as mentioned above, but I don't fucking care about this guy or like him! I'm here for the human characters, but the movie isn't, and it's a complete misunderstanding of what made the book good!

So I think I'm going to give this film a 4/10 for the Dracula adaptation scale. I have to appreciate some of the smaller things that manage to make it's way into the film, such as the Demeter, Dracula's wolf form, and the cutting off of the heads thing. But it fundamentally misunderstands the point of it all. This film focuses extremely heavily on the religious aspects of the original novel, which could have been interesting but again, falls flat. So much of what this film is trying to do as an actually accurate adaptation goes nowhere, or goes somewhere new and insane yet entirely uninteresting.

Now, did I enjoy this movie? I think you may have already gathered the answer, but let's keep going.

I was expecting a lot better from this movie. At least, in theory. Wes Craven is a big name horror director for a reason (though I have not actually seen any of his other films), and I was hoping the bad reviews were either a result of this being a cult-classic level actually good movie or a so-bad-it's-good film. It was neither of these things.

The movie definitely had it's moments- the fight between Marcus and Simon in the town hall was one I really enjoyed, for one. But it was greatly overshadowed by Everything Else. Firstly, there was the adaptation factor- I wanted this to be at least a decent adaptation, so the longer the movie went on, the more frustrated I became in that regard and the less I could enjoy it. But there was also the overwhelming misogyny of it all.

This movie does not treat any of it's female characters well. All of the brides (Solina, Valerie, and Lucy) fall into the "slut who has to die" trope, and have very little character outside of that. Lucy is definitely the worst example of this. She shows up briefly in a few scenes with Mary, but her greatest amount of screen time comes when Dracula goes into the record shop (CALLED VIRGIN SUPERSTORE BY THE WAY. FRUSTRATINGLY ON THE NOSE.) that Mary works at in search of her. He instead finds Lucy, who is instantly attracted to him and invites him to their house, despite not even knowing his name. She and Dracula then have a weird as fuck sex scene- part of which is ON THE CEILING. BECAUSE HE FLOATS SO THEY'RE ON THE CEILING FOR SOME REASON.- and he kills her. It's unclear how much of this is Lucy actually acting of her own volition and how much was Dracula manipulating her mind, but after this scene she (and the other brides) all only exist to be catty and bitchy towards Mary about the fact that she's Dracula's favorite girlfriend and to be sexy and tempting to Simon. You see why this makes the movie unenjoyable, right?

There's also a scene involving Solina after she becomes a vampire that... I'm not gonna describe too in depth, because it's literally just her being insufferably horny towards a police officer and a doctor. But I bring it up at all because it serves no point for the plot. Most of the horny scenes in this film you can argue, at least a little, that they're relevant to the plot. This scene has no relevance to the plot, outside of establishing that Solina is hanging out with Dracula after the town hall scene, which, y'know, definitely could have been done in any other fashion!

Mary also has basically no agency up until the end of the film. She spends most of this movie running around scared, up until the final 15 minutes where she's actually allowed to do stuff. And look, I know that the original novel is wildly sexist. I know! But that is actually something I'm fine with being left out of an adaptation! That's allowed!

I know I gave Van Helsing a lot of praise, despite it's poor treatment of the female characters, but the key difference here is that Van Helsing actually let the female characters do things sometime. Their motivations were pretty wonky, but at least they had some.

Dracula 2000 also has a lot of humor that fell flat for me. Some of the jokes did actually land, ("Sorry I'm an atheist"/"God loves you anyway" and "I don't drink [prolonged pause] coffee" for example) but most of it felt like it was trying way too hard. Specifically, the script felt like it was trying really hard to do the same thing this movie's marketing was trying to do- pretend this is an actual Wes Craven movie. It didn't work for me.

Frankly, I found myself too frustrated with Dracula 2000 to actually enjoy myself most of the time. There was promise in this movie. The character concepts could've, maybe, been executed well, and at the very least some of the fight scenes were actually really enjoyable, and it made me so mad that they were sandwiched into this otherwise really disappointing film. 3/10 on the enjoyment scale. Part of me is tempted to put it lower, but I have a feeling if I do another film on this list will be so frustrating that I'll regret it. Ultimately, this film wasn't bad, just not very good and deeply frustrating, so we'll keep 0-2 for films that are actually, verifiably, bad.

Overall, Dracula 2000 gets a 3.5/10. I could give you a TL;DR about all that, but frankly, I think you've heard enough from me. Hopefully tomorrow's movie is better.