All you have to do is turn around and there’s a high chance you’ve bumped into an adaptation or two of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and they unsurprisingly cover the entire spectrum of greatness.
On one hand you’ve got Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish 1992 version that remains one of the greats, but on the other there’s entirely forgettable fluff like last year’s The Invitation. However, one of the worst without question is the nu-metal and frosted tips reboot Dracula 2000, which somehow managed to sneak in a genuine game-changer of an ending into an otherwise flaming dumpster fire of cinema.
It’s entirely okay if you forgot about the time Gerard Butler played Vlad the Impaler in a blockbuster boasting Wes Craven’s name slapped all over the marketing, because it was terrible. There’s barely anything to recommend whatsoever until the final act, which throws caution to the wind and lays the most unexpected of cards on the table.
It might be cruel to ruin it for those unaware, so consider this your spoiler warning for the uninitiated; right at the death, it turns out that Dracula is actually Judas Iscariot of biblical fame, who’d been cursed to an eternity of vampirism for having the temerity to betray Jesus Christ and then commit the unforgivable sin of suicide as a result.
It’s one hell of a rug-pull that completely upends the entire mythology, so the fact it came in a film that was trashed by critics and bombed spectacularly hard at the box office is a massive missed opportunity. However, Dracula 2000 has escaped from its tomb of irrelevancy and returned to notoriety on iTunes, with FlixPatrol revealing subscribers have decided to dig it up and see if it’s worth another shot.
Spoiler again; it isn’t, at least not for the first 90 minutes.