Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula (DVD Review)

19 Apr, 2011 By: John Latchem

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Street 4/26/11
Indican
Horror Action Comedy
Box Office $0.02 million
$24.99 DVD
Not rated.
Stars Tiffany Shepis, Trent Haaga, Russell Friend.

If you’re going to call a movie Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula, you are going to create certain expectations in the mind of the audience. Foremost among them is the idea that notorious gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow will come across the Prince of Darkness and fight him.

Well, that kind of happens here, though the screenplay by indie writer-director Timothy Friend spends a lot of time with the undercard before getting to the main event.

Not to get all Mr. Skin about it, but the main selling point of the movie is the gratuitous full-frontal nude scene by horror maven Tiffany Shepis about a half-hour in. I mean, she’s no Faye Dunaway, but what do you really want from a movie called Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula?

You can file this one under that same horror subgenre that gave us Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and to a lesser extent Freddy vs. Jason — a high-concept premise best explained by taking two popular but separate groups or characters and pitting them against each other. Dracula and Frankenstein tend to pop up in a lot of these mash-ups for obvious reasons that probably have nothing to do with the words “public domain.” For an example of a more-effective use of the concept, check out the “Buffy vs. Dracula” episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

BCVD offers two competing storylines. In the first, after a little fake-out, we get Bonnie and Clyde (Shepis and Trent Haaga) putting a gang together to rob some moonshiners. The film portrays the eponymous pair more or less as generic gangster archetypes, rather than attempting to capture some of their historical traits (or, at the very least, aping the characters from the 1967 movie).

The second thread involves the freakish Dr. Loveless, who has resurrected Dracula to use his blood to heal himself. Or something. And he has an annoying sister he keeps locked up and uses as a slave for thankless tasks like draining the crap from his body.

The storylines don’t intersect until an hour into the film, and when the movie is only an hour-and-a-half long that might not be the best strategy.

It’s typical ‘B’-movie schlock, good for a few laughs and a whole lot of camp value. There’s some gunplay and plenty of blood to go around, as well as the aforementioned scene of Shepis and her glistening wet body rising from the bathtub just in time to … well, you get the idea.
 

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