DRAGHOULA
Worse than finding your wife in bed with a rhinoceros
Remember the trailers for Con-Air? They made a point of mentioning that it was directed by Simon West. Nobody on the entire planet had ever heard of Simon West. And the movie sucked mightily. Remember the trailers for The Replacement Killers? They made a point of mentioning that it was directed by Antoine Fuqua. Nobody on the entire planet had ever heard of Antoine Fuqua. And the movie sucked mightily. You know a movie's gonna suck when the promotional material (and that includes the box) makes a big deal out of a director you've never heard of.
And thusly comes Bashar Shbib's Draghoula. Now, if I'd ever heard of Shbib, I'd have remembered - I mean, his last name starts with "Shb" and his first name sounds like he should be in GWAR. After seeing this film, I know why I've never heard of him. Simply put, the man sucks.
Hasn't this guy ever heard of a Steadicam? Maybe he's going for an NYPD Blue thing here, but who are we kidding? This movie just leaks patheticness and incompetence from every frame. The dialogue's terrible, and sounds improvised (and not in a good way). The performances are incredibly lame. Even the supposedly hot vampire woman is about as attractive as a box of toads. There is not one scare, not one laugh, not one gross-out, not one sexy moment. The music is just embarrassing, especially in its supposedly whimsical moments.
The songs have to be heard to be believed, although you're better off not hearing them ("I'm a boy, and I'm a girl...and I'm living in a mixed-up world"). And the plot'oh please. A researcher who lives at home with his overbearing Jewish mother (oh, there's an original fuckin' idea), trying to isolate "the guilt gene" (just kill me now) gets his mice extra cheap (they look like hamsters to me) from a Transylvanian chick, and one of the mice bites him. Then, it's not enough that he turns into a vampire - he turns into a drag queen vampire.
I shit you not, guys. He shaves his chest and legs (why?), dons stockings and puts on makeup (why?) and cruises the streets in search of victims. You know, if this guy was a drag queen in life, then I could see some semblance of a movie being made about him being a drag queen in un-death. But here, I can't even imagine why he'd start dressing as a woman. Nothing is done with this aspect of the movie at all, unless Shbib has a thing for really ugly men dressing as really ugly women.
Tied with Dracula Rising for the uncoveted position of worst vampire movie I've ever seen. You know, I look back fondly on the days when I'd only seen seven movies that I'd considered to be completely without merit. This, the sixteenth member of that brotherhood of crap, makes me long to have my innocence back. Filmed in Montreal, it's almost enough to make me ashamed of being Canadian, but c'mon, Montreal isn't part of Canada.