Ultimate Geek Fu

 
Undead Neck-Biting Bloodsuckers

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Vampire movies. We've seen 'em all. From the original 1931 Dracula through last month's Daybreakers, we really have seen 'em all, in some cases again and again, and in other cases only up to the point where we gave up in disgust. The original Universal pictures were quite good, in a period sort of way, although by the time they got around to making Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein they'd pretty much run out of gas. Ditto for the Hammer Films of the 1960s, which made American stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. I actually really liked Daybreakers, as it was an excellent parable about the truth of Lady Thatcher's thesis: "The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later, you run out of other people's money" — or in this case, blood.

But what I'm most interested in today are the bad ones. It's hard to tell which are worse: the ones that attempt to be serious and merely fail, like Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, or the ones that attempt to be funny and end up as witless excrescences like Transylvania 6-5000 or Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Thus today's topic: vampire movies, the good, the bad, and the fugly. Which are you picks, and why?

Let the arguments begin.

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