Vampire movies are amazingly saleable, which sometimes tempts filmmakers into wilful obscurity and zombie styles on the assumption that as long as there's some toothsome sex and a Dracula cameo an audience will turn up and suffer. Michael Almereyda's follow-up to Another Girl Another Planet, produced by David Lynch (who cameos as a morgue attendant), is shot in gorgeous black-and-white, with grainy Pixel Vision inserts that serve to disguise the shortcomings of the director's approach whenever he forsakes atmosphere for action.
In contemporary New York, squabbling Martin Donovan and Galaxy Craze get mixed up with the son and daughter of the just-staked "Count Arminius Voivode Ceaucescu Dracula". Edgar (Jared Harris) flirts with humanity, and has a relationship with his nurse (Amis), but the ravishingly expressionless Nadja (L"wensohn) merely drifts through, seducing Craze, feebly and begging for audience sympathy. The plot elements are mostly lifted from the 1936 Dracula's Daughter, but the sense of artfilm familiarity is reinforced by an excursion to a Castle Dracula borrowed from Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.
Like its heroine, the film is a lovely blank, mesmerising but also sleep-inducing. Moments of much needed life come from Peter Fonda as an old hippie Dr. Van Helsing, comparing his ancient enemy (played in snippets by Fonda or footage of Bela Lugosi) to the Vegas-period Elvis - "drugged, confused, surrounded by zombies, just going through the motions."