Cine Beaverhausen: Buddy B Meets Drekula, Untold

Watching Dracula: Untold, I discovered there's a good reason this particular script has been untold because, quite frankly, it sucks. And not in a good, vampire fangs in the neck kind of a way. This cheesy exploitation flick is strictly bogus Dracula, attempting to marry Bram Stoker's character to the real-life Vlad the Impaler character that inspired it. Northern Ireland stands in for Transylvania in this film, though it could be shot in Bayonne, NJ considering the mind-boggling and murky use of CGI f/x, freeze frame and use of color retouching and monochromatic tinting that looks at times as if the film were developed in a latrine.

Ineptly directed by Irish newcomer Gary Shore, clumsily scripted and God knows what the original cinematography looked like before all the dank, trendy but ill-executed retouching, it all comes together as a particularly tacky and tasteless blood pudding not likely to sit well with you. Reconceiving the Dracula legend as an action film, basically, seems a misguided notion reflected in the disappointing box office results this flick has received, at least in the USA.

Handsome Welsh actor Luke Evans seems to be struggling to give a solid performance though the rather choppy editing works against it. Veteran Brit actor Charles Dance -- who can currently be seen on HBO's Game of Thrones and the upcoming film, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- shows up as a slurpy Master Vampire (that's his name folks) and shows us all that, for him these days, there ain't no bloody valley low enough.

This sure ain't Lugosi (though released by Universal, ironically), Hammer horror with Christopher Lee or, for that matter, even Count Yorga, though it gets to its blandly unscary Gothic horror element about a third of the way through a thankfully trim 90-minutes-plus running time. Released for Halloween season, this is a trick; not a treat. Horror fans, beware.