Richard Griffin’s indie flix celebrate the sex, gore, and campy goodness of 70s and 80s horror, exploitation, and grindhouse movies (I blog about most of them here) so I’m always psyched when a new one comes around. This time he takes on the king of the vampires in The Sins of Dracula.
Fans of Griffin’s movies will immediately recognize the leading man; Jamie Dufault was also the leading man in Murder University. This time around, he plays a good religious boy who leaves the church choir to join the local community theater, where his girlfriend introduces him to her misfit friends: a geek girl, a druggy, a gay dude, and a new waver named NuWave. Yes! It takes place in the 80s!
You just come to daddy if you want a lead in my show, pretty boy!
This quirky bunch of sinners and deviants is the least of Jamie’s—or the theater’s—problems, because the director has plans for a revival…of Dracula! And that’s going to require blood!
I always feel at home when a movie opens with an axe murder drenched in Argento-esque red and blue lighting. It’s what happens next—and for a good part of the film—that is not what I expected. It almost feels like we have a kinder, gentler, less raunchy and wrong Richard Griffin film! The Sins of Dracula is dialogue intensive, and while the crude humor is present in conversation, the usual visual Griffin gore and sexual perversion is minimal for a majority of the film.
But hang in there, because once you get to a campy play on the Salem’s Lot floating vampire at the window, the indie wackiness takes over. There’s blood. There’s bloodsucking. There’s sex. There’s gay sex (a Richard Griffin staple). There’s even demonic possession and an exorcism loaded with perverse humor. The Sins of Dracula comes to a very Griffin climax. And just wait until you see a gay vampire get impaled….
Dude! That’s not his neck you’re sucking….
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