Available on DVD Tuesday, April 26
Cast:
Tiffany Shepis as Bonnie
Trent Haaga as Clyde
Allen Lowman as Dr. Loveless
Jennifer Friend as Annabel
Russell Friend as Dracula
Directed by Timothy Friend
Review:
As the film’s title suggests, Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula is a genre mash-up, mixing the period crime film with gothic horror. The villain’s name “Dr. Loveless” actually gives away a big influence.
Dr. Loveless, as you may know, was the name of a recurring villain played by Michael Dunn on the popular 1960’s TV show The Wild Wild West (the less said about the 1999 feature film version the better). That series, very much like the Diana Rigg/Linda Thorson seasons of the iconic British TV series The Avengers that were running during the same years, regularly combined its James Bond-style exploits with elements of science fiction and sometimes even horror.
Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula is a far less successful genre mix that fails to realize its considerable ambition.
That said, the film does start with several very creative scenes. First, we see a bloody corpse come to life. We then see a pair of home invaders enter a house that they discover, with fatal results, has already been taken over by the famous outlaws of the film’s title. Next we see Dr. Loveless, in a very effective split-screen shot, watch the feral Dracula he has imprisoned in a dungeon feed on a female victim through her genitalia (bringing to mind a similar stunning scene in Ray Garton’s classic 1987 vampire novel “Live Girls” and, to a lesser extent, the thigh feeding scene from John Carpenter’s 1998 Vampires).
This opening salvo might get your hopes up but the cleverness and invention end there. For instance, the Annabel character, intended to be a kind of childlike waif that Dr. Loveless has imprisoned, is simply annoying and will have you reaching for the fast-forward button, especially considering there is a lot of screen time devoted to this character.
When our outlaws finally cross paths with Dr. Loveless and the now rejuvenated Dracula, Bonnie is transformed into a vampire, Dracula is destroyed and the pair escapes to create a new life.
While the above paragraph might sound interesting, the on-screen results aren’t. The opening scenes are by far the best the script ever gets and the production just doesn’t have the budget or the level of directing necessary to meet its lofty goals.
The digital video format detracts from the period setting and is very distracting during the action sequences, especially in moments when a kind of slow-motion effect is attempted. This is a low-budget production whose subject matter truly cries out for film. Even a gritty 16mm would have been a huge improvement.
On the acting front, Tiffany Shepis turns in the film’s best performance as Bonnie. Trent Haaga, a multi-faceted figure in low-budget independent horror films whose credits include screenwriting on Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s searing portrait of misogyny and small town desperation Deadgirl from 2008, unfortunately doesn’t create a memorable Clyde.
Overall, Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula deserves some credit for its opening scenes and its attempt at a fresh blending of genres. However, given the undeniable budget, screenwriting and directing issues it has, the film kills its own chances of emerging as the entertaining minor cult gem it clearly wants to be.
