Originally posted on March 11th, 2015

A Bunch Of Dirty Mothersuckers!!!!

A young man and his girlfriend sit in his car, parked on the side of a deserted forest road. Another couple pull up next to them. After some trash talk, the cars race down the stretch of road. The first couple flip their car when the boyfriend loses control. The other couple flees the scene. Friends. Pretty sure Whodini wrote a song about them.

The young couple have died from their injuries… or at least that’s what we are led to believe as the ambulance driver loads their bodies into the back of the vehicle. They are taken to the local funeral home, operated by a Mr. A. Lucard. We’ll pause here for a minute so that the slower members of the reading audience can grasp what I’ve just typed. A. LUCARD.

If you haven’t caught on to the obvious by now, well, too bad. This needs to be posted by Friday night & I can’t afford to wait on you.

It is revealed that the girl has sustained serious injury, but she is very clearly not dead. She is laying nude on an examining table in a darkened room when a group of men enter and turn on the lights. Vampires. One of the bloodsuckers bites into her neck and drains her. She’s gotta be dead now, right? Yeah, no.

The girl is then staked through the heart to prevent her from turning into a vampire herself. She’s definitely dead this time. You can tell from the glob of ketchup left on her boob when the flat-edged stake is removed. She will now be prepped for burial. Sticking with the food motif, it’s worth noting that the putty used to patch the hole left by the stake looks like peanut butter. And we all know that when it’s time to patch up a body with legume-based food stuffs, choosy vampire morticians choose Jif.

The next scene introduces us to Marie Fonda. Marie’s sick, elderly mother has been spending her dying days with Marie and her husband, Ted. Marie enters her mother’s room to find that the old woman is close to passing. As Ted returns home from work, his wife runs to him with tears streaming from her eyes. In this most emotional of moments, Marie never actually tells her husband why she is crying. The scene then fades to black. This was also the point where the editor took his smoke break as the scene does not fade back in for at least 8 or 9 seconds.

Lucard arrives to take the body back with him to the funeral home. Lucard is short, balding, and just generally weaselly looking with his suit and mustache. This is not at all what I’ve been told that the Lord of the Undead would look like. Not threatening or imposing at all. This guy looks like the concierge at some over-priced resort. In other words, the polar opposite of the bad guy at the end of Castlevania. You lied to me, Konami. That’s pretty fucked up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A-hole of you.

The next morning, Marie informs Ted that she now wishes to hold her mother’s funeral at their home. Ted calls Lucard to tell him of their change of plans, but Lucard doesn’t want to give up the body. He cites “legal reasons”, saying that he is mandated by the county to embalm the body and oversee final arrangements. After his wife implores him to do so, Ted’s heads to the funeral home to snatch Mom’s corpse. After a few attempts to stop him from searching the mortuary, Ted is allowed to retrieve the old woman’s body.

Lucard travels to Fonda residence, hoping to talk Ted into returning the body. Lucard is seen putting on what appears to be blush as he is driven to the house Fonda residence, presumably to make him appear more alive. It would seems that certain things have been overlooked here, most noticeably that Lucard casts a reflection in the compact mirror with which to apply his make-up.

What the Fonda’s don’t know and what you won’t care about is that Moms ain’t dead yet. I’ll pause while someone makes the obligatory Monty Python and the Holy Grail joke. We done now?

The old woman was bitten, but (thanks to Ted’s interference) never staked. Lucard now has to retrieve Mom’s body before she before she can turn into a vampire herself, thus ruining the blood-drinking pyramid scheme that the vampire populous have set up for themselves in this little town. Granted, it’s a town whose only human residents are the Fonda’s and the dead kids from the first scene.

Lucard sends one of his minions to break into the Fonda’s home and steal the body. After a run-in with Ted, the lackey tries to escape out of an upstairs window. Sure, there is no ledge or lattice-work to support him, which cause him to fall and impale himself on a picket fence. But hey, it’s the effort that counts!

The local sheriff and ambulance driver arrive to take the dead vampire away. There are no real questions asked. There is no need as both of these men are part of Lucard’s vampire clan. Both men are just trying to get in and out without raising more suspicion.

Ted blames Lucard for the break in and begins to suspect that the man may have more sinister motives. He blames Lucard again the following morning when the old woman’s body does indeed disappear. However, what Ted doesn’t know is that dear ol’ Mom has gone unstaked too long and is now a vampire.

Will Lucard and his men find Mom before their secret is exposed? How will Ted put a stop to this vampire conspiracy? Why does no one else live in this town? Have you figured out the “A. Lucard” thing yet, genius?

Dracula’s Last Rites was directed by Domonic Paris. This would be the only film that Paris would direct in his film career. He would later go on to direct traffic as the crossing guard at an elementary school in Spanish Fork, Utah. He wasn’t very good at that either. 12 kids were killed under his watch.

Actually, Paris would reappear many years later as the writer of animated kids’ films such as Fly Me To The Moon and A Turtle’s Tale Parts 1 & 2.  Those movies? Also responsible for the deaths of 12 children.

As far as compliments, the film does have a fairly decent story at its core, and some of the dialogue is quite believable.

What? That’s it. That’s all the compliments. There is nothing else positive that I could possibly say.

The actor portraying “Lucard” is just unlikable. That may be a credit to his acting abilities, but the acting praise stops there. “Ted” is neither here-nor-there in his performance. And I believe that “Marie” was played by a potted plant. She now gets kicked over on a daily basis by baby-daddies on Maury.

I don’t think that I’m hurting anyone’s feelings by saying that this is a bad movie. Look, these people didn’t even finish building the sets. In almost every indoor scene, you can see where the wood paneling used as a set stopped just about a foot over the actors heads. The lighting and cables are also on full display in all of these shots. The electrical’s acting was quite impressive, comparatively.

If you are looking for a fun way to kill 90 minutes, you could do so much worse than “Dracula’s Last Rites”.

No, wait, you probably can’t.

I can’t find a trailer for this movie. It probably went uncompleted with the sets. So, instead here’s a trailer for The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It’s a better movie, anyway.

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