Call it old fashioned and naive, but I still believe that there's entertainment to be had by putting traditional horror staples into the final frontier... when you're completely out of other things to do with them and desperate to avoid having to come up with an original idea. Yes, I'm a sucker... I also lick her, fuck her, and bite her when the moment calls for it. Trust me folks, if you really want to please the one you love, watch a few hours of oral sex porn and take notes. If you have to literally take notes and tack 'em up around your bedroom as a reference while in the act, then do it. There are few things a man, woman, or man-woman enjoys more than someone who knows how to make the "bad kiss down below" oh so good. This doesn't have anything to do with Dracula 3000, I just thought I'd offer up some free relationship advice for the boys and girls out there. Me and the Evil Dead Bride just celebrated our 9th anniversary a few weeks ago, so trust me, doing tongue exercises for 15 minutes a day is the extra concrete every couple's foundation could use. Now, about Dracula IN SPAAAAAAAAACE...

For starters, let me get any and all speculation out of the way right now: this movie is not a sequel to Dracula 2000. I always speculated that it was, but I was wrong. This Dracula never took a pay day from Ponchus Pilot and he's not in love with any young girls who work at Virgin MegaStores. I just wanted to clear that up for anyone who was eager to see this movie or condemn it based on their opinions for Dracula 2000, cuz there’s plenty . Different cast, different crew, different Dracula. This is the 3000 model, not the 2000 model. Capiche? Spiffy.

The flick's directed and co-written by Darrell Roodt, who also did Dangerous Ground with Ice Cube and Elizabeth Hurley, Pavement with Robert Patrick and Lauren Holly, and a handful of other movies I've never heard of dating back to a witch doctor slasher flick from 1983 called City of Blood. Roodt's co-writer on D3K is a guy named Ivan Milborrow, the bulk of whose career consists of boom mic operation and sound mixing... these two give me very little hope for that which I'm about to review, but with a cast of bad movie misfits like Erica Elaniak, Udo Kier, Tommy Lister, and Coolio under the lead of Casper Van Dien (who I just had to put up with in The Fallen Ones last week!), there's bound to be some entertainment to mine somewhere in this cinematic black hole! So, with a little bit of grit and a whole lot of cinemasochism crackling through our skulls, let us venture forth into a time long ago and a galaxy far away.

Abraham Van Helsing (Van Dien) is the Captain of the galactic deep space salvage ship known as Mother III. He's also a former Special Forces officer, his mother's maiden name is Asswipe ("it's pronounced 'azz-wee-pay'!"), he has a star shaped vasectomy scar, and the sexual move he's always wanted to try (but never will) is the Angry Pirate. Look it up. On a tip from an associate, Helly heads into the Carpathian System (*groan*) in an attempt to salvage what's left of the ship Demeter, lost some 50 years prior yet still cruising through space on a course from it's home planet of Transylvania (*grooooooan*) towards Earth, as if it was being piloted by some kind of phantom crew... so long as it's not the Phantom Menace... or it's gay porn equivalent, the Phantom Man-Ass... uggh.

Since outer space salvage is far from being a one-man operation and because every Captain needs a crew (otherwise he's just a crazy guy in a hat), Helsing also brings along his mandatory group of ragamuffin associates: super smart wheelchair-bound science guy Arthur "The Professor" Holmwood, eye candy intern navigator Mina "the chicks don't get nicknames" Murray (who looks like Kyra Sedgwick), big dumb muscle-head ghetto stereotype Reginald "Humvee" Parker (Lister), pot-head cargo specialist (no idea what that means) Francisco "187" Brett (Coolio), and sexy dame Vice-Captain Aurora "chicks still don't get nicknames" Ash (Elaniak). Okay, what in the name of Jimmy Walker's teeth is up with Reggie's "Humvee" nickname?! Shouldn't Humvees be long-past obsolete in a thousand years? Wouldn't calling a guy "Humvee" in the year 3000 be tantamount to calling him "Carriage" or "Horse & Buggy" today? "Hi, my name is Reggie, but you can refer to me as an inefficient fuel burning late-20th Century military utility vehicle adopted for civilian use by dickless shitheads with no better use for their money. Pleased to meet you!"

Upon boarding the Demeter, the crew discovers the oxygen levels on the ship to be purer than even what they find on Earth circa 3000. Meanwhile, we discover that Reggie's an unapologetic chauvinist and borderline date rapist as he makes dirty remarks to Mina and forces his tongue down her throat with a hearty chuckle afterwards while she recovers in shock and disgust. Welcome to the life of an intern Mina. If you're not having scalding hot coffee thrown in your face or cell phones bounced off your head, you're getting felt up by your superiors or targeted for lewd commentaries from everyone around you. As I was saying, our crew finds a dried-out human husk that used to be Udo Kier’s character, but Helly and friends still plan to tow the beast back to the blue planet and pawn it for a few million. Of course they get trapped on the ship when Mother III mysteriously disengages from the cargo hauler while the crew's still on board, leaving them stranded until the ginormous rust bucket's path eventually carries them all back to Earth with it. Things in movies like this are never as easy as that though, so in the interest of inviting some conflict into our story (and mercifully thinning out our cast of non-actors), 187 and Hummer find a cargo bay of nothing but coffins filled with a mysterious white ash...

Before you can say "Are these Hello Kitty band-aids the only ones we have?!", 187 cuts his hand while breaking open a casket lid with his trusty stoner crowbar. Drug addicts with crowbars: stealing your car stereos and robbing your ancestors' burial places for thousands of years! Naturally, some of the goober's THC stained hemoglobin spills into the body-box’s "worthless dust pile", and the previously lifeless remains of a what was once the star faring undead named Orlock is pseudo-alive and ready to kill some more! The production company probably didn't have a lot of room in the budget to afford craft services for extras, so it looks like instead of resurrecting his monster squad, Oreo's just going to work over the crew one-by-one starting with '87 and ending with... meh, who cares. Aurora's got a secret, Abe's revealed to be a descendant of the original Val Helsing (duh) but finds out that it takes more than a last name to make you a "great vampire hunter", despite her own name Mina's part in the story is negligible, Orlock shows us he has televangelical powers like making the crippled walk, the Demeter's original captain's "final solution" apparently had a 50 year timer delay, and Humvee finally gets to live out his lifelong dream of fucking an artificial life form that doesn’t require inflation or a patching kit...

Damn, that was an irritating nuisance to finish out the year… We just sit there watching crap unfold at a pace only slightly faster than Christy Brown in six inches of snow. But even when stuff does finally start to happen, I was actually starting to miss when there was NOTHING happening. Blargh. Whatever wasn’t boring was just badly done. I’d throw down the possibility that the whole thing was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I think that’d be giving too much credit to the dinguses (dingi?) in charge. If anything, D3K is tongue-in-ass-cheek. Most futuristic flicks at least take a chance at “futurizing” things a little. Dressing up a handful of d-list actors in whatever they wore to the set, giving them some prop handguns, telling them to read lines from a script that could fit any modern age story, and tossing them into an empty industrial complex decorated in Soviet Union chic does NOT make me think “Oh what an advanced civilization our world will one day be!”. Speaking of the Soviet Union shit, what's with all the fucking hammer & sickle deco on this ship?! There’s a big Soviet Union flag hanging on a wall, the ship’s computer system has a hammer & sickle screensaver, but there’s noooooooo mention of why! Did communism rise up and eventually crush the capitalist swine of the 30th century?! Much like the rest of the movie, there’s NO explanation! I guess I should feel lucky we even got the limp-wristed “Orlock is the last survivor of a planet full of vampires” origin, but why bother to put the fucking props in and confuse the audience further?! If you want us to hate you, just put scenes of war atrocities and naked clowns with swastika tattoos on their dicks pissing on newborn babies and raping the elderly for 20 minutes and we’ll hate you plenty! This? This is just wasting our time and yours.

Speaking of hate, I’m allergic to acting this bad. My eyeballs broke out in a rash. Coolio will be getting my hospital bill. Speaking of which, the only thing more annoying than Coolio? Vampire Coolio. The only thing more annoying than Vampire Coolio? Vampire Coolio talking about "stroking his anaconda" and wanting to give Ellie May's top shelf a DNA whitewashing. The man hasn’t gotten laid since Dangerous Minds came out and rightly so. Everybody else? Yeah, they stunk too. “Septic tank plugged up with skunk carcasses” stunk at that. Baaaaaaaaaaad. Tommy Lister was better off just grunting and seething in No Holds Barred. Even with big patches of ‘Z’ shaped hair on the sides of his head, I still took the man more seriously then than I do now. I may not like Van Dien, but even he doesn't deserve to be stuck in this cast. As for Udo, Mr. Kier's character only pops up in video clips throughout as a visual diary of what happened to himself and the rest of the Demeter's crew. His entire role took about as much effort as those friggin’ “video confessionals” the morons in reality shows record. I like Udo, but given his tame-ass delivery, I hope his paycheck was just enough to buy a week of lunches at McDonalds. If he made more than that on this, my eyes will roll so far back into my head that the optic nerves will snap. Now, just so I don’t have to end the year on a sour note, here’s something fun.

Seeing as how this is my last review for 2008, I thought it appropriate to end with a round of New Year's resolutions for the 365 days ahead. I never make resolutions because I have no idea what the coming year will bring (plus I'm too damn lazy to stick with any of them), but for purposes of comedy, here's what I've got planned for 2009: