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 2021 Warhammer Storyforge miniseries Angels of Death. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2005 Michael Goguen film, The Batman vs. Dracula.
You can thank Rob for this one. I certainly have, and colorfully.
The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)! This is from the follow-up/relaunch/whatever you want to call it to the end of the formal Batman: The Animated Series, as that franchise was heading off into the Justice League family of shows. It is not a particularly highly-regarded superhero cartoon series, so far as opinions on those go among adults, though it certainly has its share of contrarian, “It’s actually good!” or, perhaps more permissibly, “It’s better than you remember!” defenders. Perhaps the thing it’s best remembered for positively is Batgirl’s character redesign, which modernized the 60s purple Batgirl outfit and was a stepping stone to the 2014 redesign in the Batgirl comics that sticks around to this day.
The thing it’s best remembered for negatively is this guy:
By the time The Batman vs. Dracula rolls around, we’re thankfully not dealing with this character design anymore; the Joker is back in the purple suit with orange shirt and green highlights that he’s best known for, though he still has wild long hair and, worse, he’s still a barefoot-is-legal guy. The first design is emblematic of the sort of different approach this series took to the material: the Warner Brothers Saturday morning licensed property cartoon approach. The director of this film, Michael Goguen, is not the venture capitalist by the same name, but instead the character and storyboard artist from B:TAS (among many, many other things) who eventually left that team and moved into a production role alongside The Batman showrunner Duane Capizzi. Their joint track record as producers prior to taking on The Batman included Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm (Goguen only), Extreme Ghostbusters (Capizzi only), Men in Black: The Series, and immediately beforehand, Jackie Chan Adventures; these designs, including the version of the Joker above, were created by Jeff Matsuda, also fresh off the Jackie Chan Adventures. So this continuity of stories and characters is known as the Matsudaverse, but it exists in a long lineage of really middling IP-driven factory-farmed shows that were one or two seasons and then out. Opinions may vary, but as someone who occasionally sat through an episode of Jackie Chan Adventures when my younger siblings had the TV remote and literally nothing else was on (because they weren’t huge fans of it either), The Batman delivers the level of quality that the Jackie Chan Adventures would lead you to expect from this team.
The Kids WB approach is all over this thing, especially when it comes to the villains. Martial arts is a lazy shortcut to get some action on the screen, so not only is the Joker capable of going hand-to-hand with Batman for a little bit, even the Penguin can do leaping spinning kicks and take down cops and guards. The dialogue is mostly written by pun; we’re not talking one or two of them sprinkled in here but puns as a primary method of communication, filling entire scenes where plot and characterization would usually go, emptying the full magazine of every vampire-related pun they could think of onto the page, down to the laziest and the hackiest. Not only does Penguin deploy, “I got you a PLASMA television,” and, “she’s got great JUGULARS,” in the same scene about Dracula watching Vicki Vale on TV, he drops them in next to each other, they’re neither the first puns in the scene nor the last, and someone made sure to have him say, “You know, as in blood,” after the plasma television line because that one might have been a little bit above the show’s reading level. For some reason he doesn’t explain the jugulars one.
While enamored of every single hack blood or fang pun the writing room could come up with, the script is completely disinterested in telling its story. Not a compelling story; just a decently-crafted story. A lot of stuff just happens because it’s supposed to. We’re not talking, “Well, why doesn’t Dracula just kill Bruce immediately,” though, yes, you could ask that; that sort of Eagle-flying-to-Mordor plot critique gets a pass. We’re talking, “The inciting event of the story is that Dracula’s just randomly buried in a Gotham cemetery with no explanation why; Penguin opens his coffin while looking for buried treasure on a tip from an Arkham inmate who disappears after the first two minutes of the movie.” We’re talking, “Joker ‘drowns’ in the first 15 minutes, obviously setting up his return as a vampire and Batman vs. Vampire Joker…but instead he didn’t actually die and just kinda got out of the water and wandered over to the cemetery so he’d be in the right place for Dracula to bite.” Mostly stuff just happens because it has to happen; there are a number of tolerable little nods to the original text, though by this point I’m real tired of the “Dracula is admiring her neck, not her necklace” spot and the “Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards” spot, which we get in quick succession at the Wayne Manor dinner party that ends act one. Bar none the best reference to other vampire media is calling the civilians that Dracula snatches up for his army the “Lost Ones” and having missing posters up like the ones from The Lost Boys in a scene or two, and that’s not like, good or interesting; it’s just kind of unexpected, and there’s the bar to clear.
Is it worth enumerating the whole plot? You know the plot. Dracula’s back, baby, and he turns series regular villains and some stock background characters into vampires; he tries to turn Vicki Vale into his vampire bride through soul theft, but Batman uses gadgets to stop and then destroy him, and that’s okay because we have a line in here about how Dracula is a monster instead of a man. Sure. I guess this Batman wasn’t all that broken up about Joker “dying” at the front of the movie beyond a pro forma, “Yeah, gotta be better about that next time,” bit of dialogue with Alfred, so it’ll do. There are two load-bearing action scenes in the film, the first being Batman’s act two encounter with Dracula where he gets punked out and saved by sunrise, and the second being Batman versus Vampire Joker at, of course, the blood bank. These scenes are where the budget and creativity of the film go. (The finale is also an extended action sequence but it’s incredibly rote; stabbing the Lost Ones with the You’re No Longer A Vampire science juice instead of stakes and then sunlight machining Drac himself in the Batcave, which happens to be a three-minute fight scene away from the vampire’s crypt through linked underground tunnels. Convenient!)
There are some interesting ideas in the first fight. Dracula’s dodges are very nice, the wall-walking and shadow-hopping is well done and you get the intended vibe that Dracula walks away with the win here easily if he’s less interested in chatting and playing with his food, which is a well-worn trope for both sides of the encounter. The city isn’t interesting in the way that Gotham was interesting in Batman: The Animated Series, because the aesthetic demands here revolve much more around making the guns look more sci-fi and less like real guns than they do establishing place and presence or making Gotham City a character. Dracula in his human guise is very obviously modeled off of the Peter Cushing Hammer Horror installment of the character, and you can see it in one or two stills early, but by this point he’s looking very Ra’s Al-Ghul. Which is fine; The Batman wasn’t allowed to use Ra’s due to Batman Begins being made around the same time, so there’s not another guy looking like this running around.
The star of the Batman vs. Vampire Joker fight is this blood bank, the only really characterful piece of architecture or intriguing location treatment in the entire film. There’s no reason for a blood bank to look like this or take up this much space except to accommodate the fight scene, just like there’s no reason for Batman to have a bank robbery alarm installed here except to accommodate the, “It’s a blood bank!” pun-chline when Alfred asks Bruce why he’s worried about a mundane bank robbery in spooky times such as these. But while the line of dialogue is irritating and stupid, the visual design of the blood bank implies very weird aesthetic things about the world of The Batman, things which only sneak through occasionally (like the steampunk look and feel of Arkham Asylum and its wardens) when the team is making compromises on form for function — or age-appropriate content restriction. For instance, the scene strips out a lot of color as they fight through the shadows of the bank’s main, high-ceilinged room; this is probably less an artistic choice than it is a compromise to show giant pools and waves of blood as black liquid instead of red. It’s still pretty neat to look at! The fight itself is nothing special. The movie really leans on garlic as its vampire’s bane of choice; one understands not wanting to have Batman out there slinging around the Christian cross as a weapon (though the crosses on tombstones in the cemetery do prove the religious symbol’s passive efficacy), but surely he could add some silver to the arsenal. They go through so much garlic in this movie. I suppose its true value-add was mainly in all the terrible puns it enabled for the writers.
Neither of these fights are what I’d call “good,” though I wouldn’t call them bad, either. They serve their purpose. You can do a legitimately good fight in a DC Comics direct to video animated film. You can even do a good fight in one of these throwaway mostly-non-canon crossover projects. Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019), for instance, has this in it:
It’s serving a different narrative master than the first confrontation between Batman and Dracula by establishing these two guys as rough equals, if different in their specific disciplines, instead of showing two vastly different power levels, but that also makes for a better fight scene and is arguably a better master to serve. Batman vs. Vampire Joker certainly isn’t a patch on it. And while you can do better, much better, even given the age-appropriate restrictions The Batman operates under, this team was interested in filling inventory for Saturday morning programming slots instead of flexing those muscles, unlike the B:TAS and later Batman Beyond and Justice League teams which managed to do both.
I was worried I was going to get through the whole film without finding anything nice to say besides, “Penguin is a good choice for the Renfield role,” which he was, but they botched the execution, or “At least it was only 90 minutes,” which it was, but it could have shaved off a few more. By the end I found the one thing, though; something approaching an actual theme or throughline, even though the creative team themselves ignored or fumbled it. When Dracula rises in Gotham, he’s pleased to learn of the existence of the Batman; his immediate, confident assumption is that Batman is an homage to him, using his myth to strike the fear of the bat into his victims. One of the big reasons his first showdown with Batman lasts until sunrise is because initially he doesn’t want to kill Batman — Dracula wants him to serve as his vampire emissary. Batman is firm against the entreaty: He’s not using the Dracula myth and while he’s heard of the guy (Dracula exists as a pop culture figure in the world of The Batman), he thinks of him clinically and with a little bit of contempt.
After the fight, we have a mid-movie recapitulation of Batman’s origin story as he sleeps off his bruises. When this happened, I hated it. Not every Batman movie needs the Frank Miller pearl necklace Crime Alley origin recap in it; least of all this one, I thought. It focused a lot on the bat, which I noted at the time and didn’t think more of it beyond, “Yeah, Dracula, also a bat.” But! Hypnosis and mind control have always been part of the Dracula toolkit, and they’re on full display in this movie — he can’t get much done without them, which is true enough to most interpretations of the character. And after controlling Bruce with ease earlier in the film at the dinner party, when Dracula does it again at the climax, Bruce breaks free of it — using his Batman myth to overpower the encroaching Dracula myth and throw it out. Now that’s good stuff, or it can be when developed and properly deployed; here, it gets something like 80% of the way there and you sort of have to fill in the blanks the rest of the way. At the very least, it’s much better than Batman just gritting his teeth and fighting free of the mind control by Thinking Real Hard and grunting like he’s on the toilet. If someone was gonna take another stab at this general idea who wasn’t the team responsible for The Batman, the myth of Batman against the myth of Dracula would be something — maybe the one thing — from this film to keep their pocket.
There have been a lot of vampire-adjacent Batman stories, both in his mainline comics and in the DC Elseworlds brand of non-canon make believe stories where you can do stuff like turn Batman into a vampire and have his friends or kids hunt him down and stake him. The most famous of these is a trilogy of Elseworlds books where Batman and Dracula face off, with Batman becoming a vampire in order to defeat the bloodsucker lord in the first book and then the expected consequences of that decision in the second and third. This isn’t one of the better ones, and it’s probably worth a skip unless your boss tells you to write it up for your vampire movie column because the patrons voted for animated vampire films this month.
Speaking of! The patrons have spoken, and from the choices of Blade, Blade, Blade, and Blade, they’ve selected next month’s theme: Blade. I will be handing the wheel over to Greg next week so he can write about the movie in this trilogy everyone loves, and then I’ll be back for the second and third installments.
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