Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Alisha Weir
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I had nominally avoided it during its theatrical release last year, as Dracula’s Daughter (1936) was easily one of my least favorite of the Universal monster movies. But, then Beyond the Caving in the Woods comes a-calling, and one of these days I may have seen all the horror movies.
Did I Like It: I’m left mostly bewildered by the film. Had it committed to its original idea and indeed been a remake of Dracula’s Daughter, it might have accomplished a number of things previously just out of reach. It would have the been the best possible type of remake, taking a previous film that didn’t work and improving things. It could have also been Universal’s attempt—the fourth one, by my count—in recent years to make a shared monster universe.
But it isn’t either of those things. It barely manages to answer the pitch of “Reservoir Dogs (1992) but Lawrence Tierney turns out to be a vampire and also, there’s a little bit of Home Alone (1990) in there as well.” It accomplishes that excessively busy goal only so much as it ticks off those disparate elements in a perfunctory fashion. I didn’t think I’d get to the end of this longing to watch Dracula’s Daughter, but I definitely didn’t feel like I got anything out of the film that I wouldn’t have gotten from watching Reservoir Dogs, Home Alone… or any of the other attempts Universal has made to light the Dark Universe.
The humor of it all doesn’t quite connect, characters react in awkward ways to everything happening in the film, and at the risk of offering spoilers, I had to look at a plot synopsis to really understand that Joey (Barrera) wasn’t made into a vampire in the film’s climax.
It’s a mess. It may be a mildly likable mess, but it is still a mess.