Dracula 2
I’m watching these completely out of order, but Dracula 2 gives me hope seeing both Khary Peyton and Craig Schiffer’s names in it. Of course I know this is a Gary Tunnicliff effects film, and I got to meet Jason Scott Lee’s character in Dracula 3– a movie I enjoyed enough to want to explore this middle one now as well.
We have a woman in white running for her life against a shadowy figure, what’s interesting is the figure is Lee – our vampire Hunter. What they are doing, is turning the tables. She’s not in innocent victim, she is vampire and in a few minutes and she and her twin sister turn the tables, attacking Lee and trying to destroy him. Getting a fight sequence with a marvelous beheading like this before we’re even five minutes into the film leaves me confident that the director who gave me Dracula 2000, one of my favorite vampire films ever, is on his game and about to give me something remarkably fun.
Schiffer is a paralyzed college teacher and Peyton is one of his students. It’s a great deal of fun to watch these two Hellraiser alumni together but it’s not long before we get a shot of the burnt up Dracula from Dracula 2000 hanging from neon cross and then delivered to a morgue, and now I’m ready for this thing to start in earnest. The corpse is completely desiccated and blackened and the doctor begins his autopsy. While the skin is charred, the organs inside are pristine – white even, as if they had never been touched by blood. While checking his teeth, a fang pops out – piercing the finger of one of the 
morticians. A single drop of blood hits the body which absorbs it greedily. Our mortician put in a call to Scheffer, while Lee, in full priest gear arrives at the morgue and stalks the halls, looking for a vampire to kill. He arrives, under the guise of giving the body last rights – but it’s too late… The morgue attendants have absconded with the body. A phone call from someone interested in buying the body came through and the $30 million payday was too much for them to resist. We find themselves on the road spiriting the body away to a property where they can test the body and figure out what’s going on. It’s a gorgeous old mansion deep in the heart of Romania (these kind of scenic locations were a staple of these kind of productions as financial concerns led Dimension to start filming there frequently in the early 2000’s).
The group fills a tub of blood in attempts to reanimate the corpse, as Craig Schiffer watches on a computer monitor. It’s all very reminiscent of Hellraiser, particuarly when the bloody corpse emerges from the water alive and energetic – Dracula has risen, emaciated and bloody alive. They subdue him with light and water. , and then keep him captive with iron chains and UV light. It’s kinetic and modern, and for a moment almost feels like the Lost Boys.
It’s a vampire action movie though, despite the scientists best efforts to study, the hunter arrives, the infection spreads and the action starts. Great execution where vampires are blown out the window by a gunshot, then bursting into flames she plummets down.
I got admit, I dig this series a great deal more than it deserves. There is something about the style in which it’s made, it just really appeals to me. It’s not nearly the film that Dracula 2000 was, but as far as fun vampire and action films, this works. It suffers a little bit from being the middle entry of a trilogy and you have to pair it with number 3 to really satisfy, nevertheless this is one I’ll definitely be coming back to with plenty of rewatch value.
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