With his camera pointed at the cleavage of almost every woman in the cast, Mel Brooks films another genre parody this time of vampire movies.
An incredibly unfunny comedy. Almost every joke and gag seems really forced and tired and also 20 years out of date. Leslie Nielsen was hired to lure the suckers in thinking they were going to see another Airplane or Naked Gun type of comedy. What they got was a bunch actors hamming and milking supposedly comic situations so broadly they made Abbott and Costello look subtle.
It's always amazed me that Mel Brooks got away with his tired genre rehash comedies as long as he did. He's seen a lot of old movies and knows all the cliches so he knows what to make fun of. Mel Brooks was also smart enough to put enough schoolboy smut into his films to make them seem a little contemporary even though his interest was clearly in recreating and spoofing old films.
Dracula Dead and Loving It is so out of funny ideas that even with all the breasts on display, Brooks has to stick in two musical numbers just to pad out the running time. In the old days of The Producers or Young Frankenstein he played these musical moments for laughs, now it seems like he is actually taking them seriously.
This film was a complete bust and appeared to be the end of his film making career. In 2001, Brooks turned The Producers into a Broadway musical and he was proclaimed a comic genesis all over again. However the film musical version of The Producers turned out to be a big flop supposedly due to Brook's constant interference with the director Susan Stroman.
88 minutes
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