Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1958 Terence Fisher film Horror of Dracula. Today, he looks at the 2000 Patrick Lussier film, Dracula 2000. This article will contain spoilers.
Alright, time for the other big vampire movie from the turn of the millennium.
What’s most disappointing about this creature of its era considered in the cold light of 2025 is that it landed in the hands of guys who did the wrong kind of schlock. Director Patrick Lussier, who co-wrote the script, got his start in the chair on The Prophecy 3: The Ascent — yes, the third film in the “trilogy” formed by great 90s Catholic horror flick The Prophecy and its two trashy, forgettable sequels. But though Lussier will be with this particular Dracula project all the way through the aughts — he is the director of Dracula 2000, Dracula II: Ascension (should have just gone with The Ascent again, who cares), and Dracula III: Legacy — the most important thing to know about him is that he got his start as an editor, doing Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the first three Scream movies. Though he has a lot of non-horror editing work on his resume, all his notable credits are 90s Slasher Horror, and that’s the sensibility the execs, Wes Craven himself among them, wanted on the project. But that sort of film is built around goofy one-liners, comedy horror kills, and goofball cartoon physics — and it just absolutely doesn’t land for what’s going on in Dracula 2000, which in its best moments tries to apply that 90s Catholic horror vibe from The Prophecy to a retelling/sequel/adaptation (the script itself is confused) of the Dracula story. In the end, what you get is a film with a couple fun scenes that very much refuses to be good and never quite manages to make it to fun-bad, while pretty much wasting Gerard Butler in the title role.
Our plot is overly complicated, mainly because the script is a legendary mess that insists on an untenable dual proposition: One, that the epistolary novel “Dracula” by author Bram Stoker exists in the world of Dracula 2000 as-printed; two, that the plot of the film itself is a modern adaptation of the epistolary novel “Dracula” by author Bram Stoker. So you have an early scene where Christopher Plummer, playing Abraham Van Helsing pretending to be his own grandson Matthew Van Helsing, references the book by name as libelous poppycock about his “ancestor,” and then roughly the very same plot of that book plays out in this film, except with some changes of venue and many more minor vampire mooks for Simon (Johnny Lee Miller) to kill in order to try to hide the fact that he, the putative male lead, is completely ornamental to this film.
The basic plot, which takes three paragraphs to describe even with some minor elisions, is as follows: Van Helsing defeated Dracula at the turn of last century but was unable to fully kill him, and was infected by his blood curse while doing so. He keeps Dracula’s corpse locked in a vault and uses leeches to feed off the remains of the regenerating, hibernating body and give himself tenuous eternal life. His new secretary, Solina (Jennifer Esposito), has conspired with her boyfriend Marcus (Omar Epps) to rob his vault, which she believes to be full of valuables. (The only interesting thing here is the very brief hacking scene, which in true post-Hackers fashion features RUN CRACKZ.) They find only a coffin, and two of Marcus’s four henchmen are killed by Indiana Jones-style stake traps that Van Helsing has set. Nevertheless, they steal the coffin, somehow charter a private jet and attempt to fly from London to the Cayman Islands, mirroring the last voyage of the Demeter. Sort of. A plane that size probably shouldn’t be flying transatlantic. Nota bene: The very first scene of the film, twenty minutes earlier, is the actual last voyage of the Demeter. Dracula awakens, murders the remaining two henchmen, kills Solina and Marcus, and does the same thing with the plane as he did with the boat, crashing it into the bayou outside New Orleans. He gets to work, turning a local news anchor (Jeri Ryan) into a vampire and heading for the city, which is celebrating Mardi Gras.
Meanwhile, Mary (Justine Waddell) wakes up from a nightmare, where a hot Scottish man with flowing 90s hair was released from his coffin. Her roommate, literally named Lucy Westenra (Vitamin C, yes, from the Graduation song), provides backstory about how she’s been having nightmares all the time and maybe she needs to have some casual sex to work it out of her system. Mary, however, is a good Catholic girl — she’s friends with a priest at the nearby seminary (Nathan Fillion!) and she and Lucy work at, sigh, the local Virgin Records megastore. Virgin’s product placement in this film is absolutely heinous — vans in parking lots, shirts on characters, the store as a major set piece, everything. Van Helsing flies to New Orleans and begins his hunt, dispatching the now-vampiric heist crew and looking for Mary. Dracula gets up to speed on the nightlife of the new century, while Mary leaves work early after having visions of him again — she goes to the seminary to consult the priest, while Dracula goes to the Virgin Records megastore and seduces Lucy, who takes him back to their house, fucks him, and gets turned into his third and final bride.
Van Helsing arrives at Lucy and Mary’s house too late, with Mary gone and Lucy turned; Dracula makes quick work of him. Now Mary comes home and finds her father dead, staked through the neck and left to bleed out rather than fully turned into a vampire. She is taunted by Dracula’s three brides, and Dracula attempts to seduce her here, but she flees to the seminary, then the church graveyard, and finally is captured and forced to listen to Dracula’s horrible secret: He’s Judas! That’s why crosses and silver hurt him so much: They’re signs of his betrayal. He’s still working through all his sad broody guy feelings about Jesus, but until then he’s gonna keep turning babes into vampires and engaging in hedonism. He turns Mary into a vampire here with his bite, but she has a stronger will than all his other victims; she betrays him, killing his three brides and hanging him from a garish neon cross as the sun rises. As Dracula dies, he forgives Mary for betraying him and revokes his curse from her, with the implication that Christ forgives him as well, and his soul leaves his wretched body. Which is still hanging around? The film closes with Mary taking up the Van Helsing name and the eternal vigil of her dead father: To protect the corpse of the vampire in the Carfax Abbey basement, just in case it wakes up again. Also the final shot implies she’s still a vampire, but a good one now.
You may have noticed someone missing from the above! I didn’t mention Simon’s name once, because he doesn’t actually do anything this entire film besides mediate it for the audience. Here is what I omitted: He follows Van Helsing from London to New Orleans; he does most of the (very bad, very goofy) vampire fighting in the parish house against vampire Solina, vampire Marcus and the rest of that crew; he’s the character Van Helsing tells his backstory to on the ride from the bayou to New Orleans; he finds Mary at the Virgin Records superstore after she returns to work (but after Lucy has left with Dracula) to do even more exposition — she doesn’t leave with him, but goes home to face Dracula alone; he has a fight scene with Marcus in the parking lot that is even more vestigial than the rest of his appearances, as Marcus appeared to be killed in the previous fight scene at the parish; he shows up at Mary’s house as she’s fleeing Dracula and fires Van Helsing’s silver bowgun at Drac’s wolf form to scatter him, which Mary easily could have done; he runs around a different part of the church cemetery while Dracula sweeps Mary away; he gets captured by the brides on Bourbon Street in another painfully bad action sequence; he gets brought to Mary and Dracula so she can feed on him to show her true loyalty, and it’s here Mary takes the initiative to betray the big guy while he does nothing but finish off the final two brides in, once again, incredibly bad horror comedy slasher bits. I quite like Jonny Lee Miller in other things — he was a great Sherlock Holmes on Elementary — but he’s not a 2000s action horror movie leading man and this role isn’t even that. If you remove Simon from the film, all you need to do is find a new way to get your clunky lore and exposition to the audience. Just have Van Helsing write in a journal or something. Christopher Plummer might be doing the laziest, most inconsistent German accent on the planet, but it’s more fun to hear him narrate than watch these fights.
Dracula 2000 released a year after The Matrix, but it’s still living in a pre-Matrix world. Action scenes are composites of a bunch of different cuts; decapitations and stabbings all feel slow and weightless; at least vampires get their heads lopped off on-screen and it’s mostly played for comedy, like Marcus’s head landing in a dumpster. The non-Dracula vampires in this film feel like they’re from a completely different genre of bloodsucker than Gerard Butler’s tortured and damned speechifying Judas — and that’s because they are! It took me a second to recognize it, but: Faces transforming when they bring their fangs out? Lots of weightless shoving and sloppy karate combined with cheap wirework? Having significantly more fun dead than they ever did alive? The brides, Marcus, and his crew are all Buffy vampires! The television show had been on for three seasons by the time this movie came out, and its gravity well is keenly felt all over Simon’s parts of this film.
It’s a frustrating waste of Butler, who is gorgeous and instantly magnetic in the role but mostly asked to goof off and do Virgin ads until the last twenty minutes of the movie, where suddenly we swerve back into the 90s Catholic horror roots of the project. After seventy-odd minutes of one-liners and comedy kills, it’s tough to pivot to Dracula as a kind of anti-hero or sympathetic villain who has been raging against Christ’s injustice over the centuries and leading humanity to a better way by giving them the gift of vampirism, and even tougher to keep the audience along for the ride. If the movie was actually about that and took itself as seriously in that regard as The Prophecy took itself, and if it brought in heavy hitter actors for supporting roles like The Prophecy did with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen as Satan, then they’d be cooking something here; Butler has never had either of those guys’ chops but the frustratingly-limited single scene he has with Plummer’s Van Helsing shows it could have worked out. It was just fantastically, conclusively the wrong collection of people to write, direct, and edit that kind of thing. For his part, Lussier’s heart was set more on stuff like My Bloody Valentine, the only other thing he’s directed you’ve heard of, or Terminator Genisys, the only other thing he’s written you’ve heard of. There are all kinds of stories about rewrites and revisions, including a credits controversy with the Writers Guild. And one suspects distributor Miramax Films, then at the peak of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s power in Hollywood, had their own input on how to make this thing worse, so it’s probably not all on Lussier.
Still, the goofing around has some redeeming value. The three minutes at the start of the film when I thought it might be a heist movie gave us that incredible RUN CRACKZ computer screen. Omar Epps gets to do a lot of acting with his extremely red eyes. And listen to the fucking sound effect that plays when Dracula shakes off the dust of the ages and is reborn as a beautiful monster. I assure you those Twilight chimes weren’t added as a joke by the uploader. You hear them again, just a hint of them, when he tanks those bullets.
It’s good to get this out of the way now, because our patrons over on Patreon have voted, and it’s even more 2000s vampire schlock for me going forward. We’re not going to cover the sequels to Dracula 2000, however, nor are we going to tackle the Blade trilogy or the Underworld franchise just yet — those are bigger projects for later. Instead, the four films on our plate are Queen of the Damned (2002), BloodRayne (2005), Ultraviolet (2006), and the movie we’ll start with next week: Van Helsing (2004), starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale.
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