Dear Dracula, 2012
Directed by Chad Van De Keere
Featuring the voice talent of Ray Liotta, Emilio Estevez, Ariel Winter, Nathan Gamble, Marion Ross, Tara Strong and Matthew Liddard
SYNOPSIS:
With Christmas too far away to write Santa for a Count Dracula action figure, a young boy writes a letter to the vampire himself, prompting him to come over to America.
It would be quite easy to write off Dear Dracula as a weak made-for-TV/direct-to-DVD movie and at a brisk 45 minutes, it doesn’t really hold a lot of weight. However, there is more to this short than you’d expect and there are a lot of themes raised in the movie that belong in bigger (and sadly better) productions.
Sam (Nathan Gamble) is a young boy who loves Halloween and classic monster movies and upon seeing an advert for a new Count Dracula action figure, decides to write to the Count himself (Ray Liotta) asking for his help in getting hold of the toy now as Christmas is too far away. Dracula, who is now a washed-up has-been, figures this could be his chance to get his scaring mojo back and flies over to America with his servant Mirroe (Emilio Estevez) to form a bond with his biggest fan, and hopefully help him win the affections of Emma (Ariel Winter), who lives across the road.
Looking at the cast list, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these big names would phone in their dialogue for this 45-minute kid’s movie, but you’d be very wrong. With the exception of Ariel Winter (who is fine in her very tiny amount of screen time), everyone works really hard to sell their characters. Emilio Estevez is nearly unrecognisable as Mirroe as he plays up to the Igor-type role and Nathan Gamble is very likeable as the nerdy introvert protagonist. But it’s Ray Liotta who steals the show as he gives it his all in the role of Dracula, with a voice that is traditional Bela Lugosi by way of Christopher Walken and never sleeping through any of his lines. Much like Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th, this is a project that is below the standards of Liotta but he puts in the best performance he can because that’s what credible actors do (take note Ryan Reynolds).
The movie is also a lot smarter than you might expect, raising some interesting ideas about modern day horror movies compared to the classics. A lot of the time, Dear Dracula doesn’t feel like a movie that is made for 5-year old kids and is instead written for adults who grew up with Lugosi and Christopher Lee Dracula and are now resentful of modern-day interpretations of vampires like the David Boreanaz and Robert Pattinson. There are even jabs at gorenography movies like Saw as well as the slasher movies of the 1980s as examples of why kids don’t scare easily anymore. For a movie that has the animation values of very early Pixar table scraps, Dear Dracula has an awful lot to say about the genre and does so quite poetically.
Which is where the problem really lies. Dear Dracula is nothing more than a cheap and cheerful kid’s movie that doesn’t try too hard to be anything else. This isn’t the sort of movie that will capture a child’s imagination, but it will certainly keep them quiet for 45 minutes even if they take nothing away from it at the end of the process. But the film’s themes are actually well-thought out, well-constructed and even quite funny and deserve to belong in a much better movie. Even the simple idea of training Dracula to be scary once again (which is nothing more than a 2-minute scene here) could be enough for a feature length movie with a decent budget.
It’s not bad and it’s better than you’d probably think, Dear Dracula has some good ideas but is really nothing more than a final year student project that has made it on to DVD. The animation is cheap and the story goes from great ideas to bland “be yourself” clichés, but the voice acting is great and the characters themselves are quite fun and likeable. It probably wouldn’t hold the attention of anyone older than 5, but it will certainly entertain those below that age.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 9, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
