If DRACULA UNTOLD isn’t forgotten, then it’s kind of notorious. From what I remembered it was the start of the Dark Universe, the planned shared universe of action-oriented Universal Monster reboots. The public scoffed at that whole idea, then everybody (besides me) hated THE MUMMY and the whole thing got scrapped and became a punchline.

But it wasn’t originally intended to be part of that anyway. The script had been around for a while. I remember reading about it years earlier when it was gonna be an Alex Proyas movie called DRACULA: YEAR ZERO. Sam Worthington was to star. It wasn’t about starting anything, it was about prequelizing Dracula as a thrilling 21st century fantasy adventure character – to give the iconic cape-wearer a heroic backstory, or at least good intentions and motives. Basically it asks what if before he was the Count we all know, he was what I call a Fantasy Sword Dude: the pretty cool, unevenly charismatic hero of a digital era studio b-movie.

There was then, and still is today, a prevailing attitude that this type of high concept remixing is laughable, shameful, symptomatic of a creatively bankrupt Hollywood. But that’s a viewpoint built on two snobbish premises:

1) The beloved stories of our culture like Dracula are either old hat or sacred, and either way retelling them in absurd new ways for fun is low class

2) Action/special-effects-oriented movies are low class

Nope. Sorry. DRACULA UNTOLD may not be one of the top Dracula pictures, but Fantasy Sword Dude Dracula is a great idea. I support him.

Like Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, this one opens with narrated tales of Vlad Tepes (Luke Evans, NO ONE LIVES)’s war crimes and shocking mass-impalements. In this telling, though, he’s one of a thousand boys enslaved by the Turkish sultan, grew up a child soldier, and became their scariest warrior, earning the nickname “Vlad the Impaler, Son of the Dragon.” Though he ends up abandoning them, “sickened by his monstrous acts,” he later tries to defend them in Machiavellian claims that terrorizing one village by being “a monster” prevented multiple villages from being killed in war. I don’t think the movie endorses this point of view, but it still feels like it’s brushing over the whole “our hero is the actual historical tyrant known for impaling people” concept. I mean, it’s asking us to forgive quite a bit.

When you just think of him as the literary Dracula, though, it’s pretty cool. Returned to his throne as Prince of Wallachia and Transylvania, he personally leads the band of elite knights that guard from enemy incursions. When they track evidence of a Turkish scout to a bat-filled cave on top of uninhabited Broken Tooth Mountain, they’re confronted not by hiding invaders but a hissing vampire played by Charles Dance (ALIEN 3). I like that they don’t just say “a vampire,” but instead explain him as a demon cursed to hide in the dark until he can find someone to take his place. His look seems like a conscious homage to both Count Orlok from NOSFERATU and Death from THE SEVENTH SEAL.

Later, Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper, NEED FOR SPEED), the Turk who grew up as a brother to Vlad but who’s a total prick to him, sends an emissary to interrupt the big Easter feast with demands for “one thousand boys” plus Vlad’s son Ingeras (Art Parkinson, voice of Kubo in KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS) to revive the inscripted army tradition of the good old days. Remembering that he was given to the Turks by his father as a peace offering, Vlad decides he can’t ask the same of Ingeras, even though the kid is willing to do it as his patriotic duty. Instead Vlad chops up the emissaries and sacrifices himself by going back to that cave and asking that vampire to do his thing.

It works in a cool fairy tale type of way. The Master bites his own wrist and uses a broken skull as a cup for the blood. When Vlad drinks it he’ll have three days, to sample being a vampire, try it on, take it for a test drive. He can use vamp powers in a fight, or whatever he wants, and if that’s all he does – fine, back to normal, no strings attached, glad I could help, cancel at any time. But if he gives in to the “insatiable thirst for human blood” side effect… well, then he’s stuck like this forever, and the Master is free. I think for Vlad it’s kind of like joining the BMG Music Club. He doesn’t really realize how hard it is to remember to send in the card before they mail you a bunch of stuff you didn’t want and now have to pay for.

There’s kind of a super hero movie here. He has the thrill of learning he can turn into a swarm of bats, and figuring out how to use that. Pretty soon he’s wearing a long black coat like he doesn’t give half a fuck what time period it is, cracking his knuckles, his hair slightly blowing in the wind, he uses sonar to survey the approaching army, bares his fangs, runs into a mob of like two thousand armored Turkish knights and single-handedly fucks up every last one of them – stabbing, punching, slashing, breaking their swords with his bare hands, appropriating a halberd. There’s a cool shot where he stabs a guy and the camera stays close on the sword stuck in the guy’s belly and watches Vlad kill some more guys in the reflection of the blade before he pulls it back out. Eventually it cuts to later and he’s surrounded by a couple city blocks worth of corpses, many burning. This is a PG-13 movie by the way.

For a while he hides from his old lady Mirena (Sarah Gadon, ENEMY) that his skin burns in sunlight, but she notices all his childhood whipping scars have somehow healed, which she considers suspicious. She comes across as a bit of a killjoy about all this vampire stuff, but she’s obviously right. It’s actually very believable that a guy would be this stubborn about his reckless vampire flirtation.

When he gets outed as a monster Mirena tries to convince an angry mob “He is your prince, he deserves a chance to explain!,” so he makes an angry speech, surrounded in flames, about “You’re alive because of me! Because of what I did to save you!” We know because she tells him “This isn’t you!” that he’s on his way toward being a bad guy. But he’s not a full nosferatu yet. He can still go into an empty, candle-filled church to ask for forgiveness, like a John Woo protagonist.

He figures out he can wave his hands like a conductor to control giant swarms of bats that wipe out waves of soldiers and even form a giant fist that punches down at them. Also he grows claws. Claws are cool. I would go for pointy ears and black eyes too but they try to keep him handsome most of the time.

I won’t try to convince anybody that this is some great misunderstood movie, but it is definitely the type of shit I enjoy at a weekday matinee. I don’t know why I didn’t see it back in 2014, but I’m glad I finally rectified the situation. It has what I want out of the Fantasy Sword Dude genre: shameless pulpiness done in earnest, a large scope achieved with lots of digital show-offery, fantastical digital matte paintings, flailing virtual cameras, a loud and rousing score by Ramin Djawadi (BLADE: TRINITY, CLASH OF THE TITANS, FRIGHT NIGHT remake, THE GREAT WALL). I would also compare it to movies like the RESIDENT EVIL series, with all its fun uses of cg like vampire skin and blood burning in sunlight, the Master having a long wiggly tongue, Vlad’s bat-swarm powers and sonar-vision, and the impalement of a vampire where his skin drips off leaving a cool skeleton.

Though I wouldn’t mind it leaning a little more into its horror imagery, I think DRACULA UNTOLD succeeds at mixing fantasy-action-adventure with notes of Dracula-ness: scary castles and mountains, lots of bat imagery, lightning strikes portending his arrival to battle. I like that he wears scary dragon-themed black armor with a red cape. We see him scaling mountains, the cape blowing around. Young badass pre-Count. They don’t really get into wooden stakes and coffins, but being a rich guy with lots of treasure the Sultan comes up with a great idea of filling a chamber with silver coins to duel Vlad in.

If they made this now I don’t think they’d let Cooper play Turkish. He had also played Iraqi in THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE. The movie’s portrayal of wicked Turks feels gross, but I suppose it’s in the tradition of Stoker’s novel and its movie adaptations treating someone from Transylvania as the scary Other invading our turf.

The last scene has him still around in the present, meeting a woman who looks exactly like his wife, and her name is Mina. So basically it’s setting up a retelling of Stoker’s novel, but set in 2014. What a crazy time – Richard Linklater puts out the movie he filmed over 11 years, D’Angelo and Aphex Twin drop their first albums since 2001, the Dark Prince crosses oceans of time to find his lady. Lots of things coming to fruition that year.

I remembered the reports that the epilogue was a reshoot designed to connect it to the Dark Universe. I had forgotten that some sources at the time denied this, and I tend to believe them. If they were really trying to do that they probly would’ve involved Russell Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll character from THE MUMMY. I suspect the truth is that they were considering using this Dracula in those movies if people liked him, but were deliberately leaving their options open.

Another thing I forgot is that this was kind of a hit, making $217.1 million in theaters, for a genre that even then seemed destined to be watched mostly on video and cable. So if we do consider it part of the Dark Universe then that whole endeavor wasn’t as much of a fiasco as its reputation implies. Oh shit, yeah, and it says here THE MUMMY made $410 million!? But these are both movies that despite making money I never met anybody (besides me) who liked them, so they’re remembered as failures, and that’s the correct approach, I think. The money part is somebody else’s concern.

I finally watched this because of Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU. I thought it would be funny to watch it and pretend it was the origin of that character. It doesn’t match up though, because #1, the modern day ending, #2 the mustache. Actually Evans would look pretty great with the mustache. Maybe that would’ve saved the Dark Universe.

Apparently there were scenes shot with Samantha Jane Barks (LES MISERABLES) as Baba Yaga and Charlie Cox (star of the Netflix Marvel show The Unbearable Daredevil) as Caligula, but they were cut. Sounds good, though. Two fan-favorite characters who could’ve strengthened the franchise.

DRACULA UNTOLD was the feature debut of Irish director Gary Shore. Despite its success it was nine years before he made his second movie, HAUNTING OF THE QUEEN MARY. The writing team of Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless got more of a career out of it, and I feel like even more of a chump for missing DRACULA UNTOLD now that I realize I paid to see the entire rest of their filmography in theaters: THE LAST WITCH HUNTER, GODS OF EGYPT, POWER RANGERS, MORBIUS and MADAME WEB. Man, they have a brand, don’t they? The brand of “things I kind of got a kick out of but everybody else thinks they suck.” I can’t wait to be in a mostly empty theater seeing whatever they come up with next.

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P.S. Some of you might be able to help me with something. Watching this made me get excited about this type of movie and want to fill in the gaps. You know, these 21st century studio b-movies, pulpy but taken seriously, big budgets but not blockbusters, not usually released in the summer, lots of digital monsters and fantastical settings, disrespected by critics, many of them considered huge flops. Things with a Paul W.S. Anderson or Dark Universe type of spirit – they could be fantasy-action, horror-action, maybe sci-fi-action, just not YA-oriented. I’m talking VAN HELSING, 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD, the RESIDENT EVIL series, the third HELLBOY movie, stuff like that. There’s probly not a such thing as an obscure one, but plenty may have been forgotten.

I figured there must be a bunch of them I skipped at the time, but I did some research and couldn’t find much. Any suggestions?