People who watch movies and enjoy films that are not very good, come close to the light from the projector. We look at Dracula’s Last Rites, a movie from 1980, with interest. This movie is very different from Coppola’s movie or Herzog’s movie. This movie is like finding a dried rat with a plastic fang necklace behind a closed funeral home. I like that.
A context description is needed because understanding suffers first. Dracula – the Count of Transylvania also known as Lord of the Undead – made a choice for his last residence. The chosen location is a farming community in Iowa. Instead of simply dying there, another event occurs. A truck operated by a farmer strikes him. Consider this. The Prince of Darkness experiences a lowering when a vehicle used for transporting feed corn comes into contact with him. This is a finish lacking dignity. The body is placed on the examination table of Dr. Vernon Van Helsing. A man portraying Van Helsing with a mix of confusion and eagerness, as if he just became aware of a contract error. Vernon is a Van Helsing family member.
Doc Vernon, being the pinnacle of medical ethics (or maybe just terminally stupid?), decides performing an autopsy on a dude dressed like a Victorian goth in the middle of Iowa is a great idea. He cuts out Dracula’s heart. Because of course he does. What happens next isn’t a slow-burn descent into vampirism; it’s a full-on, bargain-basement possession. Vernon starts sprouting fangs faster than a meth-head loses teeth, develops an aversion to sunlight that would make a mushroom jealous, and gets a sudden craving for hemoglobin instead of… well, whatever Iowa doctors crave (corn liquor? Sorrow?).
Why You Should Suffer Through This Masterpiece of Ineptitude:
- The Production Design: Or Lack Thereof: This film looks like it was shot on leftover Kodak from a kindergarten birthday party. Lighting? What lighting? Half the scenes are murkier than a sewer rat’s love life. Sets wobble like a drunkard on payday. Dracula’s tomb looks like it was constructed from cardboard and papier-mâché by particularly untalented preschoolers. The “special effects”? Let’s just say the fake blood has the consistency and color of cheap strawberry jam, and the bat transformations involve less convincing trickery than a street-corner shell game.
- The Acting: A Symphony of Wooden Delivery: Our lead, Gerald Fielding as Vernon/Vamp-Vernon, delivers lines with the emotional range of a dial tone. His transformation involves squinting a lot and occasionally hissing. The supporting cast? They range from bewildered locals who seem genuinely lost on set to actresses whose primary purpose appears to be disrobing with alarming frequency and zero narrative justification (ah, the golden age of exploitation!). The dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who’d only heard about human conversation second-hand.
- The “Plot”: After Vernon turns, the film descends into a chaotic, nonsensical rampage. He stalks the town, seduces women with all the charm of a tax audit (mostly via hypnosis that looks like intense constipation), and generally causes mayhem with the efficiency of a sloth on quaaludes. Subplots appear and vanish like will-o’-the-wisps over a swamp. Logic? Continuity? Character motivation? Thrown out the window faster than a vampire fleeing a garlic factory.
- THAT Bathtub Scene: Oh, you sweet summer children. There exists a sequence so bafflingly, hilariously awful involving Vernon, a victim, and a bathtub filled with… something red and viscous… that it achieves a kind of transcendent, jaw-dropping absurdity. It’s not scary. It’s not sexy. It’s pure, unadulterated WTF fuel. You will rewind it. You will question reality. You will laugh until you choke. It’s the film’s accidental crowning achievement in ineptitude.
The Verdict (Pouring One Out for Lost Brain Cells):
Is Dracula’s Last Rites a good movie? Sweet Satan, no. It’s objectively terrible. It’s poorly written, dreadfully acted, shoddily directed (by “Peter Vincent,” a pseudonym for Domenico Paolella, who probably wanted to hide), and looks like it was financed with loose change found under a couch cushion.
BUT.
Is it a gloriously entertaining trainwreck? Abso-freaking-lutely. This is grindhouse schlock at its most earnestly incompetent. It’s the kind of film you watch with a case of cheap beer, your most sarcastic friends, and a willingness to embrace the sheer, unmitigated audacity of its awfulness. It’s a time capsule of late-70s/early-80s regional horror ambition crashing headfirst into budgetary and talent limitations. It’s so bad, it circles back around to become a perverse kind of art.
Final Blood Splatter: ⭐☆☆☆☆ (as a film) | ★★★★☆ (as an experience in “So Bad It’s Legendary”)
Justin’s Recommendation: Essential viewing for hardcore trash-horror archaeologists and bad movie masochists. Approach with copious alcohol, zero expectations, and a love for the beautifully bizarre depths cinema can sink to. Everyone else? Stick to the Hollywood bloodsuckers. You ain’t got the stomach for this brand of raw, unfiltered cinematic roadkill. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to bleach my eyeballs… and maybe watch that bathtub scene one more time. Just for research. 🧛♂️🍷🔥
Drop your own thoughts (or therapy bills) in the crypt below. Ever seen a worse vampire flick? (Doubtful.)
