WARNING, MINOR SPOILERS CONTAINED:
How does one make a sequel to a semi-sequel/modern day adaptation of a literary classic? Well, just ask director Patrick Lussier and screenwriter Joel Soisson, the same dynamic duo that brought us Dracula 2000. To start things off, I'd first like to say that I loved Dracula 2000. They included enough hints to the original for me to be satisfied, while at the same time re-inventing the vampire genre with the mind-blowing revelation of an ending. The movie was fun to watch, too. Dracula II is fun to watch, but there are plenty of things that remind you that there's a reason this is skipping the theaters and going straight to video.
First of all, the cast. I don't know how many bad movies you've watched, but I've seen enough to tell me that when you get a whole bunch of a certain group of actors together, you've got a problem. Craig Sheffer, Jason London, Roy Scheider, Jason Scott Lee, and Rutger Hauer... these are all actors who HAD good movies, and have since put out movie after movie that are, at best, just okay. This one is okay, too, but none of 'em shine. Sheffer gets points because for the most part he always plays these tough guy roles, while in this, though it's still the same type of role, he's handicapped, so its a little different.
Okay, the storyline is this: it's dirrectly after the events of Dracula 2000, we meet a priest (Lee) who is the church's vampire hunter (If James Woods was the Padre in Vampires), and after a brief and sort of goofy opening, we learn that he's after Dracula, and on his way to New Orleans. Meanwhle, the burnt body of the Count is brought in to a morgue, where Elizabeth (Diane Neal) and Luke (London) figure out the body's little secret. Immediatley a call is made to the morgue offering them a large sum of money if they steal the body and then walk away. The two decide to do it, but then as they get to the meeting point decide to learn the secrets of their crispy friend, so they call in their medical colleagues, led by Elizabeth's dying boyfriend/professor (Sheffer). What they apparently want to do is learn how vampires attain the powers (immortality, self-healing, strength, etc) and see if they can perfect it so's not to have all of the weaknesses. In particular, Sheffer's character Lowell want to find a cure for himself. So they accidentally wake Dracula up, the guys with the money show up and take over the 'operation' and then things go wrong for them all. By the end there are plenty of deaths, the count is fully revived, and we learn alot more revelations of Dracula's origins.
The acting isn't bad all the time, but sometimes it's just lame, and Lee's character, although I think they tried to make him seem "mysterious" just feels out of place. The basics to the story are okay, and most of it plays out pretty good, but in parts (especially towards the end) things get muddled up or hurried and it's hard to comprehend. Bad editing calls, I think. Some of the vampire effects are good, some look cheesy, but there are some really cool scenes with Lee's vampire hunter doing what he does best... hunting.
The look of the film is great, it looks like the first one. Lush sets, cool camera tricks mixed with special effects, and it all has the right feel to it. The filmmakers also bring up some other, lesser known, pieces of vampire lore. For instance, that vampires are obsessive-compulsive, and if one were to throw out a bag of seeds or something, legend has it that the vampire has to stop and count all of them before they can do anything else. (Now you see why it's lesser known, hard to do this in a movie and have it work, but they did).
Overall, it's not a bad sequel, even for a direct-to-video one. It's not as bad as Prophecy 2 and it at least has a good story at its heart. It just seems like parts were rushed and not thought out, which may be true. I'm interested in how the third one turns out, because this one is just the first part in a much bigger story. I wouldn't have liked it half as much had I paid to see it in a theater, but on the small-screen with nothing else better to do, this is a good fun movie. Don't expect anything great or you'll be disappointed. Just expect it to be what it is, an okay sequel to a pretty good movie. At least it doesn't do what most sequels do and just rip-off the story of the first one. In fact, I give it major points just for being able to continue the story without having to do the exact same things all over again. It's worth a look if you liked Dracula 2000.
---Garth Simmons.
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