Random Lamest Movie and TV Draculas (10 items)

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  (#2) Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  • TV Program

  Everyone's familiar with the Anne Rice-associated vampires, right? The long-haired, pale, fancy-looking fellows audiences all know (and maybe love?) from Interview with a Vampire. Well Buffy's Dracula takes a leaf right out of that play book and runs away with it. Maybe, knowing Buffy's tongue-in-cheek tone, this is actually a parody of that vampire archetype

  That doesn’t stop this Dracula from being any less lame. His lips are perpetually pursed. His wig is so long it borders on Amanda Bynes's "hair cape" territory. Is he wearing eye shadow? Perhaps. This Dracula is imminently ridiculous and subsequently lame.
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  (#5) Dracula 2000

  • Film

  This depiction of Dracula - Drac-piction? Depicula? - does try to do something different with the character. They switch out Dracula's long-understood-to-be-canon original identity of Vlad the Impaler for the equally recognizable Judas Iscariot. Yeah, that's right - Judas. Bible Judas. That could have been a cool concept, and it does lend itself to an explanation of why all vampires are not down with religious iconography. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie oscillates between being boring and straight-up crazy.

  Gerard Butler doesn't so much play Dracula as just have great pectoral muscles that are constantly on show. He's less of a Dracula and more of a sex object. Really, you could take any mention of the name Dracula out of this movie, and he'd be an interchangeable sexy-vampire-stock character. However, this movie does take 'sexy vampire' to hilariously ludicrous levels. No less because this Dracula can screw his sexual partners into the sky. He and whomever he's penetrating can float across the screen like they're James Bond and Dr. Holly Goodhead in Moonraker, though, in the latter's case, they drift across the screen via a lack of gravity. In Gerard Butler's case, it's presumably some kind of sexy vampire magic.
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  (#7) Blood for Dracula

  • Film

  Talk about your lame Draculas… Kier's performance of a drained, blood-starved Dracula is just depressing. There's no charisma, cunning, or sex appeal to revel in. Instead, the audience is being bummed out for the duration of the movie.

  In this Andy Warhol-produced vampire flick, Kier's Dracula is in dire need of blood. He's practically on his death bed. Or, well, what do you call a deathbed for someone who’s already dead? Regardless, this Dracula needs some virgin blood, and, in a particularly creepy detail, it absolutely has to be virgin blood; otherwise, he'll perish. What that leaves a viewer with is an increasingly desperate and debased Dracula that sucks the joy out of the vampire genre rather than the blood he so desires.
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  (#8) Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf

  • Film

  Maybe it's unfair to call this Dracula lame. But when Dracula comes to mind, nay, when all vampires are taken into consideration, it's almost impossible to divorce them of their ties to sexuality. Vampires have a storied history of being written as sexual metaphors. The whole act of blood sucking is almost always depicted as a sensual experience. If not sensual, then it's downright violent. So when it comes to a kids' cartoon Dracula, it's always going to come up short.

  This Dracula runs a Monster Rally Race but is in dire need of a werewolf to compete. He turns Shaggy into a werewolf and demands he race for him, offering him the deal that if he wins, he'll make him a human once again. Sure. As far as Dracula's go… this one is pretty lame.
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  (#9) Dracula Untold

  • Film

  Yet another spin on the Dracula origin story, Luke Evans's Dracula is a mopey vamp with a martyr complex, sucking all the fun out of the Dracula mythos while donning suspiciously Asian-inspired looking Armour, pulling an Iron Fist with the cults-approps (cultural appropriation if you don't like abbreviation).

  The more recent depictions of Dracula seem intent on rewriting history and making him into a tortured, tragic hero, battling his inner demons. That’s not what Dracula's all about. People want the bloodlust. The creepy sexual overtures. People want the cape and the accent and the charisma. If viewers want to see dark, antiheroes they can pop on a Warner Brothers/DC superhero movie. Make Dracula fun again!
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  (#3) Dracula

  • TV Program

  This short-lived NBC period-drama was actually pretty entertaining. Most of the time it was a nutso show about light bulbs and the power of electricity, peppered with some lesbian activity. The only thing consistently letting the show down was Dracula himself. God, Dracula was a real drag.

  Rhys-Meyer's Dracula was in a near-constant state of broody mope-dom. Not to mention he had assumed a secret identity of brilliant scientist/light bulb-enthusiast, Alexander Grayson. So the audience was mostly robbed of seeing Dracula be, well, Dracula. And that's a shame. Because this show could have been a fantastic vehicle for some fang-banging, blood-sucking action on primetime.

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