"Dracula 2000"

Hello again, and welcome once again to the Millennium Museum.

I know I usually go all-out when Halloween rolls around--custom logo, custom themes, what-have-you--but things have been a little crazy of late, and I haven't had as much time or energy to devote to that as I would have liked to have.

All that aside, I shall celebrate the holiday with Dracula 2000. At the moment, I've just rented it from Comcast On-Demand, and hopefully my thoughts are still somewhat fresh.

It was...a curiosity. The story opens in present-day London, where a gang of thieves break into the mansion of legendary vampire-hunter Abraham Van Helsing and his young ward Simon (not Simon Belmont from Castlevania, sadly) and steal Count Dracula, dormant in his coffin. After some hijinks aboard their cargo-plane, he awakens and crashes the plane near New Orleans...and it's Mardi Gras.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the holiday was used. Normally, it's just scenic eye-candy, but here it was used thematically. The Mardi Gras celebrations seen here are an all-out bacchanalia of sex, violence, and drunkenness. Lurid advertisements for strip-shows littered the ground alongside cheap, garish plastic beads and discarded cups and bottles. Half-naked men and women in leather gear and all manner of outlandish getup swarmed through the streets, writhing and grinding to pulsing techno music. It's like a twentieth-century take on Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

That being said, however, the Mardi Gras scene is never presented as a sign of moral degradation, at least not as long as the holiday remains the one night of pure chaos before Lent, the forty-day period of order, restraint, and self-control. The human revelers may look like a peculiar bunch at first glance, but they'll go back to their normal, decent lives the next day. The same cannot be said for Dracula and his kind, for they are the sign of moral degradation. They can party all night long, sleep throughout the day, and then go straight back to partying once the sun goes down. They're freed from human and societal constraints, but they're enslaved to their bloodlust. They can neither create nor contribute anything to the world but a net loss.

Worse still, religious symbols--the Bible, holy water, the crucifix--cannot harm these vampires. Is it because they're too strong, or is it because our faith is too weak? Dracula 2000 tries to suggest that both are the case, but it doesn't quite work, not least because it comes up with a baffling plot twist.

Are you ready?

In Dracula 2000, Dracula is revealed to be the undead Judas Iscariot.

I'll repeat that, in case it didn't quite register.

In Dracula 2000, Dracula is revealed to be the undead Judas Iscariot.

I know! I could scarcely believe it myself. It just about works as a way of making him thoroughly unstoppable by conventional methods but providing a means to bump him off at the end (he gets hanged on a stray electrical cable, and then fries in the sunlight).

To be fair, it is an original take on the character, and it's not as if anyone could simply ask him. I just feel that it weakens Dracula in some way, because, to me, he works precisely because there's something unknowable about him.

Perhaps my antipathy toward this revelation comes from how disappointed I was at the lack of "2000" in Dracula 2000. Had the cast and crew found some way to tie all of this stuff into the Millennium, I would probably be much happier with it. Everything in it--Mardi Gras, the religion angle, even the thieves who break into Van Helsing's super-secure vault at the beginning--all could have been seamlessly threaded together. For example, the gang of thieves could have been sent from some agency bent on bringing about Hell on earth in time for the millennium, and Dracula's incredible strength could have been a meditation on how traditions are losing their strength. (Then again, this would probably have made Dracula 2000 too closely resemble End of Days.)

All we have is a bunch of threads without a unifying idea to tie them together.

I think a second viewing is in order. There may be one or two things I missed the first time around.