BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (11 OF 100)

 

"Dracula 3000" (2004), Dir: Darrell Roodt
 

Nothing in Budget vs. Direct to Video

Back in my Blockbuster Video days, I was stuck working the Thanksgiving Day shift and going home to nobody. At the time, a co-worker of mine was from Sri Lanka and in the same boat, so rather than both spending our night by our lonesome, we decided to join forces and watch an array of bad movies instead. Of our three picks, each will be reviewed in this blog. There was Boa vs. Python, Waterworld, and the king of stink, Dracula 3000...

Oh, Dracula 3000. Completely unrelated to Dracula 2000, which has Star Trek Voyager's very own 7 of 9 getting staked in the boobs, Dracula 3000 is about a team of space aboard a craft called Mother III (Alien rip-off #1), a salvage ship that finds a derelict craft called Demeter. The crew of this ship is led by Captain van Helsing... Yeah, that's his name. Clever, huh? And better yet, played by Starship Trooper's own Aryan-bred Casper Van Dien. The film also stars Baywatch's Erika Eleniak (the not-so-hot one), Tom "Tiny" Lister (the president in The Fifth Element), and former rap sensation Coolio in a performance let's hope he's terribly ashamed of. We'll get back to that later.

So the crew finds the dead captain of the Demeter clutching a crucifix. During this discovery, their own ship Mother III decides to take matters into her own hands (Alien rip-off #2) and abandons the crew on the Demeter... without any explanation. It isn't long before Tiny and Coolio discover a cargo bay full of coffins. Thinking the coffins might have been used to smuggle drugs, Coolio opens one and is attacked by a vampire. Now under Count Orlock's control, an army of vampires intend to force the crew to bring the Demeter back to earth (Alien rip-off #3), and release a blood-sucking, vampire clusterf*&% (as if the earth's population couldn't possibly fight off 20 to 40 vampires).

Now, for all its terrible plottery, terrible actors, and a set that looks like the back of a grocery store (but turns out was a re-used set from the short-lived series Space Rangers), the biggest flaw of the film is Coolio. In mentioning my co-worker from Blockbuster at the beginning of this review, I wasn't just trying to highlight that I once had a friend, and that friend was a black-friend too, and a woman for that matter, but that her reaction to Coolio's performance was what put Dracula 3000 on this very list.

If you were around in the 1990s, you remember Coolio's 1995 hit song "Gangster's Paradise." For this socially-conscious tune, Coolio received the reputation of being a street philosopher and a positive role model for black youths. Flash-forward ten years to Dracula 3000 and Coolio is playing a pot-smoking cargo specialist named 187... Yep. 187. His interests are getting high and sexually harassing Erika Eleniak. When finding the corpse of the Demeter's dead captain, Coolio insists they search it for drugs. When Coolio turns into a vampire, instead of killing Erika, he goes on a rant describing in great detail how much he fantasized about, well, you might as well just watch the clip... And unfortunately, I cannot find the clip where Coolio chases Erika around the produce department -- I mean, ship, trying to run along the walls after her. Now, typically, when attempting something like that, a film production would employ special effects. But since this particular production didn't have any money, instead, what we get is Coolio trying to run along the walls himself, and for some reason making offensive monkey noises, leading to a speech where he actually refers to himself using the N-bomb. At that point, my co-worker screamed, "Holy sh*%! Coolio just sold-out his entire race!" And for the guy who used to speak out against negative black stereotypes, to do a complete 180 for Dracula F*&%ing 3000, I would agree.

As for the rest of the movie, once Dracula (or Count Orlock) actually enters, that's when everything just starts raising too many questions: Why was a cargo ship transporting coffins into space? If it's the year 3000, why is Dracula still dressed so Elizabethean? Did the vampires at some point learn how to navigate an interstellar spaceship? And if they did, why then do they need Capser, Tiny, or Coolio to do anything? Unfortunately, the only reason one really has to watch this film is if you wanna see Coolio make a fool of himself, and he does, dearly.

For your viewing displeasure, the title character Dracula gets one of his only scenes in the whole damn movie. Poor guy.