Seeing as Dracula's Curse was from The Asylum, you would expect bad acting, bad production values, bad scripting, bad special effects, bad story, bad everything really. Dracula's Curse does show more effort than most other Asylum outings, so it wasn't the case of not trying. The problem was that Dracula's Curse came across as too ambitious. There are good things certainly. The monster is cool-looking and does look good. Not all the acting is bad either, the best actor is easily Rhett Giles who oozes charisma and intensity and close behind is Christine Rosenberg as the villainess. And the costumes and sets are a step above most Asylum movies, not opulent but not amateurish. The camera work and editing is hit-and-miss, in the fight scenes they can get confused but everywhere else they're adequate. The sound does sound rather muddied and somewhat dated. The fight sequences do suffer from confusing editing and are not particularly exciting, while the dialogue is written in a way that begged for several re-readings/writes because it sound rather stilted and senseless at times. It is also too talky, some of what was said agreed could have been shown instead. The rest of the acting is not very good, Rebekah Kochan is just grating and Eliza Swenson is so stiff in quite possibly the biggest female role in the movie. Thomas Downey is nowhere near as problematic, but he is one of those cases where he is hindered by not having enough to work with. But it was really the story and the way the characters are written. The story does get bogged down by too many side-stories(not all of them relevant either) and draggy pacing, and because there are some scenes that are pondered on too long and others(often the more important) skimmed over some of the story can come across as convoluted. The most interesting scene was probably the weapons scene. That there are too many characters also hurts Dracula's curse, and hardly any of them are developed that well, the most interesting probably is Jacob Van Helsing. The villainess Bathorly was the worst case, Rosenberg is very commanding as her but Bathorly was very under-utilised and the "less talk, more show" thing would have helped. Others like Kochan's Trixie McFly veer on pointless. The twist is okay if not particularly mind-blowing or memorable. All in all, Dracula's Curse is not a terrible movie and is much better than other Asylum movies(and with director Leigh Scott's movies I'd say it's one of his better ones too) but suffers from over-ambition, convoluted storytelling and too many characters. 4/10 Bethany Cox
