“Children of the night… what a mess they make.”

Justin’s rating: I saw everything. I wish I hadn’t.

Justin’s review: Considering the very, very long and popular movie career of Dracula, a satire was due sooner or later. And who better to tackle this horror icon than the guy who already made a mockery of Frankenstein?

It’s important to note that, despite the easy assumption to make, this isn’t an all-out Zucker/Abrams/Zucker spoofery, despite having Leslie Nielsen in the headliner role. Rather, it’s a Mel Brooks movie with less pizzazz than what came before.

Brooks doesn’t throw a thousand jokes at you in the span of two minutes — that’s not his style. He would rather slowly and deliberately roll out a gag, make you pay close attention to it, and milk it for all its worth before moving on to the next one. None of it is that subtle or clever, but in Mel Brooks’ patent style, some of it works with that old comedic style anyway.

Some of it. A little bit of it. A very little bit.

Actually, pretty much none of it.

For example, one of these long sequences sees Brooks’ Van Helsing performing an autopsy mostly to make all of his medical students faint. He does a lot of squishy stuff off camera, throws organs at people, everyone falls down, and the scene finally ends with a knee-slapper about over-emphasizing the word “emergency.” It’s not remotely amusing, and yet it goes on and on far past my patience.

About the only good part of this movie is when a stake stabbing results in a ludicrous amount of blood geysering everywhere. Oh, and a running bit about how Dracula’s mind control directions constantly backfire. That’s the kind of edge this movie needed in greater amounts.

Nielsen is a rather put-upon Count Dracula, perhaps a little too chummy looking to be taken as a threat, but he does seem like he’s having fun hamming up the famous vampire. He’s joined by Brooks himself as Professor Van Helsing, Steven Weber as Jonathan Harker, Amy Yasbeck as Mina, and Lysette Anthony as Lucy. But perhaps the best casting is Peter MacNicol as Dracula’s lackey Renfield. MacNicol, whom I always think of as the weenie from Ghostbusters II, goes full nutbar as the mind-controlled slave, laughing at all the wrong times and eating a ton of bugs.

I had two odd realizations while doing some background research on this flick. The first is that Dracula: Dead and Living It marked Mel Brooks’ final turn in the director’s chair (at least for movies), which feels like a weird note to cap such a famous career.

Second, I never knew that Brooks only made 11 films in the three decades that he was active (and a bulk of those in the ’70s). I always thought he did more for some reason.

This movie does highlight that Brooks was running out of steam by the mid-90s. While it gets points for not going cheap on the costumes and sets, absolutely nobody splurged on the humor. It’s a lot of lazy jokes oh-so-slowly lobbed at the audience in the hopes that you won’t miss one. As a result, I was pretty bored even though this film is a mere 90 minutes.

Let me simply say this: There are other, more unintentionally funnier Dracula movies than whatever effort Brooks brought to bear here. At this point, it feels like we were humoring a guy who should’ve retired years back when he was still relevant. I’ve seen Mel Brooks defenders blindly proclaim that this is an underrated slice of genius, but that’s as delusional as can be.

It’s a dud, OK? A big, fat dud that drags down two of movie comedy’s biggest names. I’d avoid it unless you want to be double-disillusioned.

Intermission!

• “Scheduled?”
• That’s one bloody papercut
• “My God, what are you doing to the furniture?”‘
• “Wrong my brains out!”
• Renfield falls asleep very fast
• Oh those horrible mid-90s computer effects for the bat
• Ew he ate a bug… and a spider
• “The poor thing is fighting for its life!”
• Dracula had a daymare
• “Enemas” are the answer to everything for this guy
• Dracula is horrible at mind controlling people
• “She’s a Nosferatu.” “She’s Italian?”