Dracula: Dead and Loving it

Watching the colorfully titled but ultimately banal would-be comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It, one is immediately struck with a burning, painful, but obvious question: “What the hell happened to Mel Brooks?” It's hard to believe that Brooks, once the incredibly talented director behind such comic masterworks as The Producers and Blazing Saddles, has lost it this badly, having left behind the wicked style and invention of his earlier work for a series of uninspired ZAZ (meaning, of course, the team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker -- the talented trio behind the original Airplane!) imitations. This latest effort -- a blatant and sadly unsuccessful attempt to recapture the flavor of his superior Young Frankenstein -- purports to offer a merciless parody of Bram Stoker's classic novel, while also taking time to lash out at its many film adaptations (with the chief target being Francis Ford Coppola's overwrought 1992 version, and rightly so). While such a project clearly holds much delicious comic potential, the material is bungled by Brooks, both as a writer and director. Despite this, Dracula: Dead and Loving It never quite reaches the depressing lows of the truly miserable Robin Hood: Men in Tights, thanks mainly to lovely, affectionate art direction and the efforts of the likable cast, who -- against all odds -- manage to deliver a few decent laughs. Peter MacNicol, as the endlessly bug-eating Renfield, is especially wonderful (if the entire movie had been up to his level of performance, Brooks really might have had something). Unfortunately, the rest of the cast, including reliable performers like Leslie Nielsen and Harvey Korman, are undone by Brooks' direction and twisted over-reliance on enema jokes and lame dance sequences (in which the actors' doubles are so plainly obvious that you keep waiting for it to be the punch line to some larger joke, a la Spaceballs). For sure, Brooks has made some brilliant, classic films, and no one, not even the most venomous critic, can ever take that away from him. But he seems to have lost his energy, and more important, his keen sense of comic timing when it comes to directing. If this film is any indication of where his career is headed, he'd probably be better off not tarnishing that reputation any further.