Too much of everything

Not even bad in a good way

I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Six years after the mess that was Vampire Killer Barbys (1996) Jess Franco returns. Perhaps someone made a bet with him that he couldn't make a worse film than that!? Franco furthers the blotch on his legendary record with one of the worst films I've seen in a good decade. It's hard to believe he had anything to do with this.The previous movie was bad but it followed your general formula and was at least watchable. Here there is barely a plot, the movie is full of random events, random sound effects and random coloured filters which make the whole thing even worse.Silvia Superstar at least returns but oddly playing a different character, which is just yet another weird decision that makes this film so insanely bad.I'm sure you could make some great drinking games out of this movie, but for entertainment you shall find none.The Good: Silvia Superstar is great The Bad: Awful cast/character decisionsSFX are awful Dracula is embarrassing Dreadful cinematographyBizarre sound work Things I Learnt From This Movie:The Killer Barbys are a real band and this was the absolute worst way to showcase themIf you played a drinking game where you take a shot every time something makes no sense, every time there is a sound effect or light filter that doesn't fit the film..............you'd be dead within moments of the opening credits.

It's ironic a director like Jess Franco who has been making films for more than forty years now has been reduced to the kind of ultra-low-budget, shot-on-video projects like this usually associated with first-time amateurs. It's also ironic that the guy that once helmed what was supposed to be the definitive version of Bram Stokers "Dracula" with Christopher Lee (although many of Lee's Hammer Dracula movies were vastly superior to Franco's 1969 version) would make something like this that is laughably bad even for a spoof.For no apparent reason, a woman (Lina Romay) has brought Dracula's coffin to a Spanish western theme park where the Killer Barbys (a punk band that kind of resembles an Iberian version of The Cramps) are performing. "Dracula" awakens and puts the bite on the park's fake Dracula and a pesky reporter (Katja Beinert) before becoming infatuated with the Barby's lead singer, Sylvia Superstar (can't really blame him there). This is actually a better vehicle for the Barbys than their first collaboration with Franco. They get to play a lot more of their music, which may not be to everyone's taste, but is FAR better than their acting. And Sylvia Superstar certainly adds a lot of sex appeal with her husky Spanish accent and her ridiculously skimpy wardrobe. This is good because otherwise there is a real lack of anything resembling sex or nudity --and a Franco film without sex and nudity is like a tall glass of water without the water.Lina Romay, Franco's wife and long-time collaborator, actually keeps her clothes on for a change, which is probably for the best as she was pushing fifty here. It's interesting to see Katja Beinert, who was kind of the German version of Traci Lords in the early 80's, except that instead of appearing in actually pornography, she only appeared in several sleazy Franco "nudie" movies and a couple German "schoolgirl report" films. Like Traci Lords, Beinert apparently STOPPED doing nude scenes when she turned 18, but the bigger problem in this movie perhaps is her ridiculous reporter character who interviews everybody (the fake Dracula, the real Dracula, etc) EXCEPT the Killer Barbys. This might be because her scenes seem to have been shot almost completely separately from everybody else's. The same is true of the great Spaghetti western character actor Aldo Sambrelli who is totally wasted here as an elderly suitor of Silvia Superstar (trust me, she would probably kill the old guy in thirty seconds if he actually got her into bed).This movie definitely has an interesting cast, but otherwise it is strictly amateur hour for Franco.

There was a time when Franco at least tried to make entertaining movies - always sloppy (he'd shoot lots of loose footage, then resell/repackage the same stuff to different distributors under different titles); but this is even worse than Lust For Frankenstein - just a cheap amateur whack-job shot on camcorder by high school students.At least Ed Wood tried to make "important" movies - but he had a terribly overinflated sense of himself, and unfortunately - no talent.Franco has talent, and occasionally employs it, but he IS a sleaze and cheese (and he's no Joe D'Amato!) Franco's best films are the most misogynistic: SADOMANIA, BARBED WIRE DOLLS, WOMEN IN CELL BLOCK 9, THE DEMONS and EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN - any of which you should watch before dumpster-diving into his many, many other duds.

I have hardly ever seen a movie of such low quality. It's nice to see actors like Peter Martell making movies again, but this movie unfortunately seems not to have had a script or an original idea. Not to talk about the camera work (probably a first time operator, at least I hope so), although the "day for night" they invented for this movie is shockingly interesting (I understood this only after the first half of the movie and when I mentioned it to the others watching the movie I could see that no one had understood the purpose of this strange color effects before). The film looks like high school kids tried to make something funny and transgressive, but did not dare to really do so. I must see some of Jess Francos older movies because he must have made something better before otherwise he could not be working anymore.