Century of the Vampire: Dracula Untold (2014)

Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.

Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2009 Peter and Michael Spierig movie, Daybreakers. Today, he looks at the 2014 Gary Shore movie, Dracula Untold. This article will contain spoilers.

Finally, the movie that this column was started to review: Dracula Untold (2014).

It’s been a year and two weeks or so since I started doing these and this film came up as a joke within the first fifteen minutes of our initial planning session -- but also not really as a joke. I have genuine affection for this stupid little trifle of a Dracula film that they thought could launch an entire franchise (and, frankly, the casting for the franchise side of it -- Luke Evans as Dracula and Charles Dance as Nosferatu -- is quite good). This was the time of the Dumb Millennial Reboots; Robin Hood would get one a couple years later with Taron Egerton (Remember him? No? Your cheat sheet is that he’s Kingsman, but he’s not Baby Driver or young Han Solo) and Jamie Foxx, notable mainly for depicting the Crusade taking Jerusalem with the exact same aesthetics and sensibilities as a Call of Duty level set in Fallujah in 2004 Iraq -- complete with ballistae standing in for shoulder-mounted RPGs -- and, of course, the Guy Ritchie King Arthur, which is a legitimately fun movie with a great cast and Charlie Hunnam. Both of those movies (and all the others like them) had sequel hooks, too; everyone was fishing for a cinematic universe the way that Dracula Untold was, because this was the height of the Marvel juggernaut, and every movie studio exec thought they were one hot movie with big buzz away from billion dollar worldwide box offices. They claim it’s only obvious in retrospect that the market could only sustain one MCU, but everyone with a brain knew these were losing propositions at the time.

(Point of order: Dracula Untold is commonly thought to be part of “The Dark Universe,” the incredibly funny decades-long failed attempt by Universal Pictures to capitalize on their catalogue of monster movie properties like the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and so on in order to make their own MCU. Its most famous legacy is probably this tweet:

Which is hilarious because a movie from this iteration of this franchise, the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot, was actually produced. The tweet’s still more memorable. Anyway, Dracula Untold was part of the plan for the Dark Universe; it was distributed by Universal Pictures, and clearly set the stage at the end for some kind of shared universe, but it was a failure and was written off -- by the time the above tweet rolled around, Evans and Dance had long since moved on to other projects. Hilariously, this is not the first failed attempt to start the Dark Universe we’ve covered in this column -- technically, Van Helsing falls into that category as well.

The Dark Universe still claims to exist as a horror imprint of Universal Pictures, but as you can see from the movie listing here, the whole shared universe thing has long since gone out the window.)

The movie itself, however: This is a crisp 92 minute feature; it gets in, it does what it needs to do, we get our Vampire Musou scenes of Dracula casting Bat Fist and Bat Blast killing the assembled Turkish armies, we get a stinger for the franchise and then we’re outta here. The plot is very simple: Vlad Dracul was a Turkish janissary who was very good at killing the enemies of the Ottoman Empire until he’d served his time and retired to his realm to have a family. General Mehmed, regrettably played by Dominic Cooper who is at least not literally doing brownface, decides that in fact he needs his best warrior back, and if he can’t have him directly, he’ll take the empire’s tithe in boys to join the military. Other than Mehmed’s casting (and maybe you can make the argument that just casting everyone on every side here as white is better than the alternatives), this is the other slightly ‘c’mon man’ thing about the picture -- we’re not exactly being subtle here about all these 12 and 13 year old boys, Vlad’s son included, being in sexual peril. The script never deviates from the “yes, we’re just taking them for military service” line, but there’s a whole lot of leering and a caress or two when the subject comes up in the initial scene in Vlad’s hall. There’s no small degree of historicity to the implications here, in fairness, but we’re doing a Dracula video game action movie; let’s keep it moving, fellas.

Thankfully they do! Vlad decides what he has to do is become a vampire, for power.

Up in the mountains in Transylvania, you see, there is a very old and powerful creature. Vlad is investigating it before the Turks show up; he learns that it is a vampire from his local friar, and once the Turks make themselves known at his Easter feast, he returns to it to propitiate it for help. This is Nosferatu, which the script calls Master Vampire and which is implied here and outright stated in some addenda (remember, this was supposed to launch a massive franchise) to be Caligula, the Roman emperor. Except this Caligula was also a general, instead of just being the son of a general? It’s unclear how he ended up in this place and if indeed this is some alternate history where Caligula never left Germania, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. He was trapped here by a demon, and he can only leave if he’s able to pass on his curse.

The bargain they strike is this: Try it before you buy it. Vlad gets the power of the vampire for three days, with all the benefits and drawbacks that attend it, and if he can go all three days without drinking mortal blood, he’ll turn back into a living man. If he feeds, he goes full vampire, and Nosferatu is freed from his cave. We already know what the ending is gonna be here; it’s just a question of how it plays out.

Vlad wakes up outside the cave at night and tests out his new powers. He can press Left Bumper to turn on Bat Sight, which highlights targets in the environment; pressing Right Bumper activates Bat Cloud, where he turns into a swarm of bats to traverse distances. Doing this out of combat allows Vlad to fly through the environment, while doing it in combat allows him to dodge through enemy attacks, giving him i-frames. Pressing X and Y are still his basic light and heavy attacks, though he no longer requires a sword to attack and has a new, more powerful unarmed moveset. He can also take enemies’ weapons in combat now and use large, two-handed weapons as if they were one-handed weapons.

He returns to his castle to find it under assault by a horde of generic Turk enemies, and puts his new powers to use. Vlad soon finds he has the same problem as all Dynasty Warriors characters: It’s not that it’s hard to kill these guys one by one, it just takes forever, even when you steal their polearms so you can hit multiple enemies at a time. He spends most of the night doing basic attacks on this army, wasting precious time on his three day clock, but clears the field with enough time left to get everyone out of the castle and on the road to a defensible monastery fortress up in the mountains by morning.

As Vlad wanders around watching character cutscenes in the new hub area before going on his next mission, he runs into the Renfield-type character of these proceedings, the Roma-coded wanderer “Shkelgim” who both gives him some vampire lore for his codex and tempts him with a blood offering to unlock his full moveset right now. Vlad declines.

Night falls with the caravan of Transylvanian refugees still a ways out from the monastery gates; an elite detachment of outriders from the main body of Mehmet’s forces catches up to them and falls upon them, and Vlad discovers he can now hold down Right Trigger to access his Bat Powers on the face buttons. RT + A, the jump button, becomes Bat Grab, where he turns into a swarm of bats that pulls a guy into the air to tear him apart. RT + Y is Bat Slam, where in bats form he smashes a guy into a tree or a wall, or off a ledge. RT + X in combat is Bat Dash, where he attacks through an enemy character and stuns them without dealing damage; good for bosses and enemies that guard. He hits RT + X three times to get the captain of the outriders into his stun animation and then RT + Y to knock him off a cliff, and leads his remaining subjects into the monastery.

On the final day, things get a bit out of control when it becomes obvious that Vlad’s a vampire and the men start rioting and setting things on fire. He uses a cutscene power you sadly never get in game to blot out the sun locally with smoke from the burning buildings so he can temporarily walk around and deliver his big, “Sure, I’m a monster, but I’m your monster,” speech. We get the final character scenes with the wife and the kids and God. Then night falls and it’s on.

Mehmet blindfolds his men to force them to walk up to this monastery, which is a decent enough trick when you’ve got troops that are that disciplined, but I would have camped out and waited for morning instead of approaching a few hours before dawn. Because Vlad now has access to his super move, which he activates by pressing in R3 + L3 (those are the two sticks on your controller): Bat Fist. You know Bat Fist if you know anything about this movie. Vlad makes a big-ass Fist out of all his Bats and slams it down into the Turks, scattering the force. You are either of two minds of this: You think it’s stupid and it sucks, or you think it’s stupid and it rules. I am in the second camp.

Vlad has essentially defeated the main host in one blow, but it doesn’t matter, because the outrider captain and his elites have returned -- the army was a distraction for them to sneak in through the mountains, drop in the back, and start killing everyone, including Minera, Vlad’s wife. They grab his son too before getting out of there. We’re heading for the end game; Minera, of course, exhorts Vlad to drink her blood to fully unlock his skill tree and max his XP bar to save their son, and he does that, freeing old Nosferatu up in his cave. The sun is rising, but with both vampires at the height of their powers, dark clouds swirl into the sky and plunge Transylvania back into temporary night.

Vlad has unlocked the ability to turn human followers into vampires themselves. He gets to it, offering vengeance to half the supporting cast which lie dying in the monastery, and they all tear through the remaining Turks. Vlad strikes ahead to Mehmet’s tent for the final showdown; Mehmet has put silver all over the room, and silver is a major vampire weakness in this fiction -- kryptonite is actually a fairly good analogy, since it weakens vampires and also confuses and dizzies them, the way the green stuff usually does to Superman in most adaptations. This is honestly the weakest part of the movie, since we’re back to a pure one-on-one fight, mostly a sword fight based on little tricks, and I can’t really continue the video game metaphor too much. But there’s a cautionary tale here: If you continue to ramp up the stakes, and you fall into the temptation of giving Mehmet vampire powers, then you’re recreating the conditions at the end of Morbius with a vampire-off. That said, I did highly praise the vampire-vs.-vampire parts of that film. Maybe Mehmet would instead get…Ottoman…inspired powers? No, I think not. Let’s not go down that road, not in the least because the only real information we get about Mehmet's army in this film is its love of boy abduction and implied pederasty. We're far from 300 levels of racist caricature with the Turks in this picture, but it's still not a particularly pleasant or nuanced portrayal.

We go through to the end in predictable fashion. Once Mehmet is done with, the vampires turn on Vlad, because not everyone can handle the curse without becoming blood-drunk and evil, and Vlad isn’t onboard with “okay we kill your son and then start bleeding the countryside dry;” Vlad would prefer to cry about it. He parts the supernatural clouds to reveal the sun and kill everyone, including himself, but the Renfield wanderer emerges to feed him blood and revive him. Then after a few more minutes of clean up, we jump to the present day in London, in the film’s most famous scene: Modern Hot Guy Vlad meets Mina, who is his spiritual wife (same actress, you know the deal) out on the town, and makes a move on her; sitting a distance away at the table is Modern Charles Dance Nosferatu, who smirks and says, Let the games begin.

And they absolutely did not begin! We never got more of this franchise, because it was a huge flop. Ingrates! Lorde even recorded -eJOeZzA">a slow melodic minor key cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World that became shorthand for stereotypical movie trailer music for years to come! I wanted more Bat Fist! Preferably next time against riot cops!

It was not to be. Probably for the best, but I think Dracula Untold holds up in the very specific way I wanted it to hold up. It reminded me that I quite like Luke Evans, who as of this writing will be Frank-N-Furter (the Tim Curry role) in the new run of Rocky Horror Picture Show on Broadway, which will probably be a much better use of his talents. I could use more of this specific type of vampire movie, sitting on the Dracula Untold/Daybreakers axis of 90 Minute Vampire Action Fests, than we have generally been getting recently.

I’m not sure what next week is, but I have some suspicions we’re headed back to vampire comedy.

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Tags: century of the vampire | dracula untold