Project Terrible 7: Dracula's Widow

Are you ready for something that really sucks? This Project Terrible film is an '80s Horror film from Christopher Coppola. Not everyone can be Francis Ford...even Francis Ford these days. It's also important not to confuse him with Chris Coppola aka 'Emilio' from Far Cry. This Coppola is Nicolas Cage/Coppola's brother. Fans of Internet Memes will be more familiar with him for a movie called Deadfall, in which Nic does coke and says 'Hi-f#$%en-ya!' while hitting a random guy in a bar. Good times...even if Nic is gone within 25 minutes of the film. With that kind of caliber behind it, what is this film about? As the title implies, Dracula's wife is shipped to America, only to discover that she is a Widow. Wanting to go back to Romania, she decides to turn one guy and just kind of hang around for a while. No hurry, huh? With random humor, gore and drama, this movie is certainly interesting. It even superimposes a Detective from a Sam Spade-style story into the movie for no good reason. To see this bloody mess of a film, read on...

For a Wax Museum (still current, movie!), a bunch of stuff from Dracula's Castle in Romania is shipped to California.  What's in the box?  Is it something red?

The titular Widow wakes up and wanders about the city.  Isabella Rosellini here sure blends in, huh?

Since her husband had a Renfield, she turns the Museum Owner.  He's so transformed that he even stops short of killing her when he has the chance.

You couldn't have saved me 65 minutes, huh?  Jerk.

For no clear reason, the Detective character is pulled out of a cheap, Dime Store Detective Novel.  It's...odd, that's all.  No really bad- just odd.

As the change comes over him, our hero must fight the urge to feed on his girlfriend.  He even buys her a cross in a nice little nod.  Shit all comes from this plot point, but it's nice that it came up initially.

A good chunk of the movie involves the titular monster killing people.  She kills some gangster-wannabe, some thieves and even a random, Satanic cult led by 'Wesley Snipes.'  The latter is the oddest as it slaps in some Nudity and Gore, but otherwise serves no point.

A Van Helsing- here as a silly old man- shows up and reveals the truth about Vampires to the Detective.  Rather than stop the 80-year old man from stabbing 'a corpse,' he just kind of stands there against the wall.

Why so yellow?

With nobody else believing in Vampires, our 'hero' is arrested for the murders, since he was at...well, one of them.  Let's ignore the fact that his prints are NOT on any of the bodies, shall we?

The titular Widow decides to kill our 'hero' now since...um, he didn't take her to Romania those times that she didn't ask him too.

Regardless, this gives our only real make-up work of note and optical effects (yes, it's one of THOSE movies), so I'll take it.  Our hero finally lets me remove the quotes by killing the Vampire, thus turning himself to human and turning her into a melting mask.  The End.

It ain't easy being Dracula...'s Widow.  The plot of this movie is not bad, but not all that great either.  The villain's motivation is to get home.  Great- do it then!  She doesn't.  Instead, she lingers about Los Angeles and kills people for a bit.  Even after the guy has been framed for all of the murders, she hangs around- instead choosing revenge over, you know, her f#$%ing plan!  Aside from that, the movie is alright.  The acting is decent at times, the production values are alright and I had a pretty good time with it.  The tone was a bit confusing, mixing humor in at random alongside the Horror and Melodrama.  Pick one!  On the plus side, I did learn a valuable lesson: if I'm going to look for a Vampire, I'll look for the big, glowing building...

Next up, a fourth dose of Terrible.  When a film makes me yearn for the 'complexity' of The Witch's Sabbath, you know that it's bad!  Stay tuned...