10 Sharpest Intersecting Films Between Vlad The Impaler And Dracula

4. Dracula: The Dark Prince (2013)

The impetus to turn variations on the Dracula/Vlad the Impaler stories into a post-LORD OF THE RINGS sword-and-sorcery franchise really got underway over the last several years. First out of the gate, beating Universal's big-bucks 2014 reboot, was this medium-budgeted swashbuckler (in the sense of the 1930s sword-fighting movies of Errol Flynn). Despite the title's resemblance to the rather impressive - to this writer anyway - 2000 tele-movie, this is an audacious attempt to meld a period action-adventure movie with Bram Stoker. It doesn't succeed, but there's a certain enjoyment to a action sequences and the liberties it takes with Stoker's text are a source of ludicrous pleasure in themselves. In the 16th century, 100 years after the fall of Vlad on the battlefield outside Bucharest, the dark prince is still resident at his place in Tirgoviste. He should be dead and gone but, of course, we know by now what sustains him. In the tradition of Dan Curtis's DRACULA and (Coppola's) BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, he has his eye on a young woman called Alina who resembles his own lost bride from the previous century. Prince Vlad is played by Luke Roberts, a flaxen-haired British soap-opera actor whose pretty-boy appeal makes him seem just a bit too fey for a convincing warlord (or vampire). Most amusing is how elements from Stoker's novel are wrenched out of place and out of time. Renfield, the madman who serves Count Dracula from behind the walls of a mental asylum in southern England, somehow turns up as a henchman in Transylvania over 300 years beforehand. The vampire's late-19th century scientific nemesis (here played by an ageing Jon Voight, falling a little way short of Anthony Hopkins' own campy turn in Coppola's film) is now an Italian-accented 'Leonardo' Van Helsing. How Dutch is that? With a sabre called the Lightbringer that was purportedly used by the Old Testament's Cain to strike down his brother Abel, and for some reason is the only weapon that can smite Dracula, THE DARK PRINCE is often amusing in ways the makers clearly didn't intend. But what did they care, when they were staging great, big, Game Of Thrones-style sword fights that all the cast - even the reincarnated muse Alina - could join in with? The same year also saw a splatter movie entitled THE IMPALER (2014), in which a bunch of American college kids visiting Romania are sliced and diced by, well, guess who? Apart from some effectively unpleasant splatter effects - an undead little boy is decapitated - it's only notable for marking the now-common conflation of Vlad and the vampire. Somebody should have told the makers that the name 'Dracula' has been out of copyright for some years now€