Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula, written and directed by Timothy Friend
It's a gangster flick, no, it's a horror-schlock fest: Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula is really two movies in one.
The film opens in a dark basement where a skinless corpse lies in what appears to be a body bag. A raw hamburger of a visage glistensÉuntil the "corpse" suddenly shudders,
a gagging, gurgling sound escaping its throat. Cut to a couple driving on a country road in a Model-T: a redhead complaining of hunger, and her slightly younger lover, packing
a gun in his pants. They stop at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, to do a robbery, or at least procure some lunch, until they meet the "real" Bonnie and Clyde, who had
tied up the farmer's family some minutes before them. Having dispensed with the intruders, the fugitives leave with the farmer's son and, as promised, let the boy go after an hour,
thus mildly raising our expectations that this B&C might have dimension.
It's true that the good first five minutes is everything. Yet beyond these initial promising few minutes, there isn't much to hold the movie together, except for badly sync'd foley
work (a delayed punch). (There's also a bit of continuity error ÐÐ when Bonnie slits the throat of the first of the two hillbillies, the second one is already gushing.)
(While we're at it, there's also an unexplained and unnecessary Japanese voiceover for a captive prostitute.)
Here is the plot that's supposed to connect the two halves: A grossly disfigured Dr. Loveless (Allen Lowman), who may or may not have interest in the regenerative abilities of vampires
(my conjecture, not explained), brings a long-haired, model-pretty Count Dracula back to "life." He is assisted by Annabel, his developmentally challenged sister (producer/actress
Jennifer Friend). Bonnie and Clyde meet with their friends at a rural whorehouse, scheming to rob a bank or some hapless bootleggers. When an encounter with cops results
in injury of one of their own, they remember the mad doctor in the vicinity, who had "hired" the prostitutes away from the establishment.
Tiffany Shepis and Trent Haaga are both more than adequate, even believable as trash-talking criminals, while Jennifer Friend is good in a totally different way,
her large eyes dominating every shot she's in. The gangster reels go for the "realistic" and the "gritty," while the horror half, with cute Frankenweenie gadgets
and intentionally (please be intentional!) bad rubber prosthetics, wants to take the route of grand guignol or Sesame Street ÐÐ or Barney the Dinosaur.
The problem is that director Friend was equally enamored of both halves of the movie and their respective cast and aesthetics, failing in the meantime to come up
with one more trick to tie them together. The film attempts humor in the incongruity, but it's thin stuff. There is a Frankenstein's Monster-esque subplot (Annabel's
innocence is deadly to the vampires), but there just isn't enough juice to hold the two stylistically disjointed hemispheres together. Maybe the film was drained by the
clash of two blood-thirsty genres competing for attention.
ÐÐ Rika Ohara
