User Reviews

I remember being an 11 year old boy in stitches with laughter when I first viewed this film on new release VCR (yeah, video - old school)!

Having just watched this film again recently I have to say that it's still just as funny as it was as a child. The film of course is a parody on the 'Dracula" mythos and the jokes and gags are much better understood if you've watched films such as "Bram Stoker's: Dracula" which I can't watch seriously anymore cos' I constantly think of this film in certain scenes and start laughing!

The cast is brilliant in their roles especially Leslie Neilsen as "Dracula" and his brain-washed slave "Renfield" (Peter MacNicol) portraying an insane, insect eating madman extraordinarily well!

The humour is all in the typical Mel Brooks 'tongue-in-cheek' style and also quite reminiscent of Monty Python in parts, the over-the-top British accents may attribute to that part.

The final film directed by Mel Brooks, "Dracula Dead and Loving It" is very entertaining and the mindless humour make for a very enjoyable spoof movie!

Highly recommended : )

This Dracula spoof has many original laughs along the way. After all the recent Vampire movies it's even more funny.

Typical Mel Brooks humor is laugh out loud and crude. The cast is good including Amy Yasbeck as Mina and Leslie Nielsen as Dracula. Mel himself plays Van Helsing. Peter Macnicol is good too as Dracula's helper. Love the mock English accents and the way they pronounce "Lucy".

It's not as original as Young Frankenstein or as ribald as History of the World but it's got enough laughs. Surprised to find out it had bad reviews and wasn't a hit. Definitely worth a watch. I am a Mel Brooks fan and this one is about in the middle of the range.

"Dracula: Dead and Loving It" is another parody of Mel Brooks, this time based on the Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" and its characters. The spoof has funny moments, especially for Mel Brooks' fans. Leslie Nielsen is good as usual in this type of movie that he became the greatest name but Peter MacNicol steals the show in the role of Renfield. The sequences of Harker impaling a stake in Lucy following the instructions of Professor Van Helsing and the ball with Dracula fleeing and Reinfield trying to save his master are the best moments of this film. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Drácula - Morto Mas Feliz ("Dracula - Dead but Happy")

This comedy followed the Bram Stoker book very closely. It merely turned the whole tale into a hilarious romp, making fun of Dracula and his inept sidekick, Renfield, as well as the other characters. A lot of slapstick gags in this film, some I saw coming from a mile off, but I still got a kick out of them. I especially liked the scene where Van Helsing and Harker staked the vampire in the tomb - what a riot. Neilson was great as the troubled bloodsucker.

Mel Brooks, a 85-year old American director and producer genius. He has made many a good movie. He is the king of spoofs. I could write many pages just about how great he is, but I'm not going to, for your sake.

This movie was a delight to watch in the time of all hallows eve. Leslie Nielsen always makes me laugh, whether he has a naked gun, is on an airplane, is the president of the United States of America or something else. He is a treasure. He is just plain awesome. He is gold! Peter MacNicol, Steven Weber and Amy Yasbeck are pretty good too. They sure do a more than decent jobs in this movie.

To finish this I will just say this was a movie well worth watching, I recommend it, it is a good movie to watch especially on Halloween.

I give it 7.5 stars out of a possible perfect 10.

Arrividerci! Bon Soir! Buenos Noches! Good Night and sleep tight ;-)

• Shevy

I was actually looking forward to watching it after I read everyone's reviews. And I was disappointed. There are some laughable parts but that's it. I've seen this movie from time to time the last 28 years & finally decided to give it a shot. It wasn't the actors, it was the story. It definitely could've been a lot better. Now that 1980 movie, "The Private Eyes" that was good! I was hoping this movie would be enjoyable like that one, but nope. Leslie Nielsen & Peter MacNicol are funny men, & I'm still disappointed that this movie was disappointing... I don't know, I suppose everyone's different.

It's impossible for Mel Brooks to make a completely bad film (well, then again, there was "Life Stinks".......) and "Dracula - Dead and Loving It", while hardly up there with "Young Frankenstein", has enough good yuks in it to make it well worth watching. Leslie Nielsen, whose work in the "Naked Gun" series I am not fond of, is actually excellent here in his portrayal of the Count, i.e., in his Lugosi impersonation. Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Mel Brooks) makes the most of her little cameo as the gypsy woman. Worth a see.

Aside from a few good jokes here and there this one was rather dull. No wonder it won an award for most boring comedy of the year in 1995. I chuckled a couple of times, but for the most part I just wanted it to be over. Mel Brooks was most definitely not at his best for this one as at times you forget it is supposed to be a comedy and it takes it self to seriously.

I'll make this as painless as possible. This is the worst Mel Brooks film I have seen in a long, long time. "ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS" is a masterpiece, compared to this forlorn mess. I laughed only once during this corny hodgepodge of backfires, flat gags, unfunny dialogue and terrible English accents. This is tragic, as we've seen so much better from both Mr. Brooks and Leslie Nielsen. This is so disappointing, considering the days when Brooks wowed us with "BLAZING SADDLES" and the horror genre send up of "YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN."

I couldn't in good conscience recommend this. Should you stumble upon it on broadcast television, find the remote quick.

Mel Brooks's scattergun approach to comedy has a number of misses. Spaceballs was OK at parodying its genre. This film is far more sophisticated and well played.

The successful jokes are on the culture of Victorain times with references to an engaged couple who after 10 years have suddenly held hands being condemned as immoral, prostitutes, lechers and the like.

Into these cultural and successful observations Brook's introduces Leslie Nielson doing a great impression of Bela Lugosi's Dracula with the difference that his powers are incompetent.

Seeing the Lugosi movie will give you the basis to appreciate the sophistication of this film.

When a "serious" movie is pitifully appalling, it is easy to write a comedic review. When a comedic movie falls into the same category, it is almost impossible to make sport of it – because any frivolity in the review may be misconstrued as comedic quality that the MOVIE possesses. So let me clarify from the outset: This "comedy" is not to be laughed at.

Who would have thought that Mel Brooks – the genius writer/director behind Blazing Saddles, History Of The World and Young Frankenstein (a successful comedy movie wholly in the vein of this failed one – pun intended) – would be prone to helming a comedy as pitifully appalling as "Dracula: Dead And Loving It"? One imagines that Brooks' comic radar is so finely-attuned that he would have seen through the financial and corporate layers of this film's drudgery and simply either abandoned it and cut his losses when he saw that it was not working, or salvaged the potential high points and let the cutting room floor eat the rest.

He did neither, which reveals that something is terribly askew in the Brooks universe. No longer is it "good to be the king" - Mel Brooks is merely an old man these days, his tastes no longer running congruent with his audience's; his comedy no longer as energetic or as biting as the wit of his youth (which, relatively speaking, was his late-40s anyway).

The Brooks gag formulas are definitely still there, but seem lazily inserted as dependable fallback material, rather than inspired stylistic substance. Jokes which I can imagine my 15-year-old self repeating ad nauseam in the schoolyard, now fall flat and wearisome on inured sensibilities.

Not only does the film suffer from rehashed and lazy gags, Brooks' direction lacks coherence and is oft-times merely cursory; there are wide shots, reverses and close-ups which serve no purpose, camera blandly flitting from one unnecessary shot to the next, not merely misdirecting our eye, but searching for subject matter to fill the frame judiciously. Many shots seem to be second-unit throwaway footage. Instead of easing back and letting the film's levity wash over me, as should have been the case, all these logistical details kept bugging my senses, detracting from the already-sparse humor.

During the cast-and-crew screening for this film, one has to wonder whether there were any genuine laughs or whether the aura of the director's past glories tainted the crew into believing that they had a good comedy on their hands, thereby eliciting perfunctory giggles out of respect for their elders.

In this film's adherence to the original Dracula story and noticeable neglect of comedic opportunities, not only did it fail as a good comedy, it becomes barely convincing as an A-List movie. Brooks did not need to re-make "Dracula". Yet this seems to be all he did – in a manner inferior to that of droves of dramatic film-makers before him. Mel's strong suit is COMEDY. So why were we subjected to a film about the infamous psychotic blood-drinker, so loosely sprinkled with jokes that they seem incongruous within the context of the morbid tale? Where you would expect punchlines, there are scene-fades; where you would expect a gag, there is exposition of the Dracula legend; where you would expect laugh-out-loud-slapstick, there are strained attempts at re-capturing youthful insouciance from laurels past. And the dance sequence between Dracula and Mina was needless padding. (Makes you wonder what DID make the cutting room floor.)

The actors vacillate between parodying Victorian characters and actually *playing* them. Harvey Korman's Dr. Seward can almost be an actual over-actor from one of the REAL Dracula movies, whilst Steven Weber's Jonathan Harker frequently comes across as an exaggerated English nobleman from a Christopher Lee film. Peter MacNichol, though, makes the perfect Renfield – for ANY Dracula film, serious or spoof - and is the only actor who truly nails his role in this blunt-toothed parody. Amy Yasbeck and Lysette Anthony are just too damn hot to be funny: all the self-deprecating melodrama in the world is not gonna help, chickie-babes - LOOK AT THOSE RACKS!

On paper, Leslie Neilsen's Dracula seemed like a hilarious coup, as did Mel Brooks' Dr. van Helsing, but both seemed to be laboring under the specter of their own reputations as funnymen. Neilsen playing STRAIGHT and being oblivious to his own humor is how he works best, but here he actively went for laughs, which means that even Brooks, as director, did not discern Neilsen's forte - or *did* discern it and chose to make Neilsen play against type anyway – either way, an erroneous decision. And Brooks' van Helsing seemed too self-aware of every mispronunciation he made - for the sake of schoolyard quotes - to be regarded as genuinely hilarious.

If Mel Brooks has grown so blind that he cannot see that the comedy boat has left him onshore; if he has become so oblivious to discernment that he actually thinks this film is noteworthy enough to be considered a vital "comedy", the movie's subtitle may well be applied to HIM – "Dead – And Loving It".

(Movie Maniacs, visit: www.thedunmore.com/POFFY-MovieReviews.html)

Disappointingly-bland Mel Brooks spoof of Bram Stoker's classic horror novel "Dracula." It has many funny moments, though, but also a lot of comic misfires.

As Count Dracula, Leslie Nielsen delivers a hilarious performance, and Peter MacNichol is funny as Renfield, his sidekick. Unfortunately, many of the real laughs don't come until the end, and in order to experience them you have to sit through the first hour until they begin. However, it is definitely worth the wait.

Mel Brooks is also funny as Van Helsing, and it's good to see "Wings" co-stars Steven Weber and Amy Yasbeck together. Anne Bancroft has a surprisingly small role as a gypsy woman (which is rather funny).

If you like Mel Brooks, go ahead and watch the movie. If not, beware...

Many people seem to have watched this movie based on its connection with Mel Brooks. Brooks was the producer, director, writer and one of the stars, playing Van Helsing. I'm honestly not much of a fan of Brooks, but I do enjoy Leslie Nielsen, who starred as Count Dracula. Nielsen had made quite a name for himself as a comedian in the previous few years in the Airplane and Naked Gun series. But, to me, Nielsen and Brooks have very different styles, and this was clearly a Mel Brooks movie - heavy on slapstick stuff. What made Nielsen so funny in the aforementioned movies was his absolute deadpan style. That wasn't much in evidence here. This was meant to be slapstick silly. And it was. It wasn't the sort of Nielsen comedy I usually enjoy.

In fairness, this movie sticks reasonably close to the basics of the story. In that, it's a reasonably well done horror spoof, and the cast all try. My basic problem with it was that, unlike many, I just didn't find it very funny. There were a few chuckles, but nothing more. Your level of enjoyment of this movie will probably depend, like mine, on whether Brooks or Nielsen are your draw. If you like Brooks, you'll like this. If you're looking for a more typical Nielsen style, you'll find something lacking. Maybe, in fact, you'll find a lot lacking. (3/10)

This was the least funny movie I have seen in a long long time. If you don't have a brain then you might be able to laugh during this movie. If you have a brain you will be offended by the supposed jokes that are contained in this movie. Avoid it at all costs.

"Dracula: Dead and Loving It" is a movie that seems to define what someone either really likes or dislikes about a comedy, and more specifically a parody: gags. For me, the gags herein worked, there were reasons for their having been used and therefore makes it funny to me. The storyline didn't stall, the gags weren't desperate for laughs, and the acting was exactly what was needed: the comedic touch.

The casting choice to have Steven Weber and Amy Yasbeck, both veterans of the TV series "Wings", was brilliant because the chemistry between their personalities was proven and honed before the movie. The choice of Leslie Nielsen for the titular role was dead-on. Someone that has the wisdom of centuries (decades, whatever), is cunning (a la the Naked Gun series), and above all, never gives up (until turned to dust). Mel Brooks, having proved his comedic prowess with films like "Young Frankenstein", comes through in the role of Van Helsing. Even the incidental characters seem to have a reason to belong and flow in the movie, like Essie, the guardian of Mina, or Martin, Dr. Seward's right-hand man of the sanitarium...

Martin: "...the patient in the west wing? He's havin' a conniption fit."

Dr. Seward: "Oh. Give him an enima."

As stated, the movie will most likely be quite funny or very dull, depending on what the viewer expects from it beforehand. Being that I like a good slapstick comedy (and I do), the performances above all are what were able to pull me in.

FOOSH-TAA!

"Dracula: Dead and Loving It" gets 9 of 10 stars

Count Dracula (Leslie Nielsen) is moving from Transylvania to London, with the help of his slave, R. M. Renfield (Peter MacNicol). Once there, however, he unleashes a flurry of charm and destruction, with only one man who might be able to stop him.

While not as good as the Francis Ford Coppola "Dracula" from a few years before (1992), this is pretty good as far as spoofs go. Renfield has always been my favorite character in the Dracula mythos, and while it's hard to top Tom Waits, Peter MacNicol does an admirable job. His voice and accent alone really sell the character.

Is this one of Mel Brooks' better works? Hard to say, but probably not. Brooks tends to either be really brilliant technically or really good with wit. This is neither. It has some wit, some technical, but nothing that makes it stand out. I personally enjoyed it more than "Young Frankenstein", but I'm in the minority.

Brooks revisits classic horror territory after Young Frankenstein; this time it´s Dracula who gets the Brooks treatment, but this poor spoof is evidence that lightning doesn´t strike twice. Although the movie is beautifully photographed, looking almost like a vintage Hammer movie, there are barely any laughs. Leslie Nielsen is not quite up to his usual Frank Drebin deadpan comedy routines, and even though Peter MacNicol delivers a note perfect Dwight Frye (Renfield in the 1931 version), as well as good turns from Harvey Korman and Brooks himself, the final result is depressingly unfunny. Hilarious stake-through-the-heart scene, though!

The one key element to UNDERSTAND and to enjoy a send-up like this is having the knowledge of its background. If you are not familiar with the original story of Dracula, as well as seeing both the Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman movies, with others in between, then the gags will be lost on you.

People have rated that Brooks is losing his touch. Not so. His audience is losing touch with his level of intellect. A send-up's gags are only funny to those who recognize the source, and realize the play of the situation taking place. In Spaceballs, for instance, the final conflict between Helmet and Lonestarr, Helmet makes a play on the "Luke I am your Father" scene from Empire Strikes Back. But if you have never seen that film, you won't know that, and so the line "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate" would be lost on you totally.

The acting is great in the movie. Those attacking the "bad" British accents should refer to other Dracula films to understand the joke. In oother Dracula films, accents come off as so fake, it's painful to watch, and that's the joke. The style of the film itself takes heavily from the Bela Lugosi version, in its design and arrangement of characters, though references to the Oldman film are used as well. Leslie Neilson did a great job in the role of Dracula, and his Renfield, Peter MacNichol, was a superb performance.

This movie deserves full credit for its level of parodistic comedy, even if it is lost on viewers. If you can't stand this movie, or find it unentertaining, then maybe you don't understand its roots well enough to appreciate it.

Mel Brooks' final film is more of a piece with Robin Hood: Men in Tights than Young Frankenstein, which isn't really a surprise how artist careers go. However, it is simply less funny for long stretches of its runtime, feeling like Brooks and his writing team of Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman settled on the first gags and jokes they came across while writing without trying to figure out how funny they actually were. There are sporadic laughs here and there, especially as the film moves into its second half, but they're simply not enough. I don't hate the film at all, but it's just simply not funny enough to sustain its rather short 85-minute runtime.

I harp on story, even in comedies, because they provide a strong structure on which to hang jokes. If the jokes don't land, at least you have a story to follow. The story here, a mangled retelling of the Dracula story, well told over decades in Hollywood, has a major problem in that it doesn't have a main character. We start with Thomas Renfield (Peter MacNicol) arriving in Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula (Leslie Nielson) about his purchase of Carfax Abbey in London. It's essentially just the attempt at a comedic form of Jonathan Harker's arrival at the castle in the original story, except happening to Renfield. This sequence has many attempts at humor, but little of it is actually funny. Anne Bancroft has a small role as a gypsy woman who warns Renfield of the dangers of the castle, giving him a cross for protection (that's never mentioned again, of course), and every sentence she ends by grabbing the skin beneath her jaw with two fingers and elongating the final syllables. It's an odd thing that feels like it's supposed to be funny. It's not really, though. The rest of the humor of this sequence involves a bat pooping on steps, Dracula slipping on the poop, his shadow showing injury rather than him, and Dracula removing the ridiculous hairpiece that is similar to the hair Gary Oldman had at the beginning of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The two make for England (complete with Dracula's coffin being slung from one side of the hold on the Demeter to the other in another bit of pratfall humor), and Dracula sets up shop in Carfax Abbey, right across the road from the mental institute where Renfield gets taken, headed by Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman), a doctor obsessed with giving all of his patients enemas. His daughter, Mina (Amy Yasbeck), is engaged to Jonathan Harker (Steven Webber) and best friend to Lucy (Lysette Anthony). Dracula gains his sights on Lucy, biting her once, weakening her, and then waits for his opportunity to fully turn her into a vampire. When she weakens, Dr. Seward calls in the services of Abraham Van Helsing (Mel Brooks), to consult who quickly discovers that Lucy's illness it the work of a vampire.

The comedy here gets better, but it's still spotty. Dr. Seward's calls for enemas never really land. Renfield's meeting with Seward where he eats bugs is amusing. Van Helsing's introduction where he grosses out a class of new medical students is probably the first time in the film that I actually chuckled out loud. Dracula sneaking into Lucy's room, though, is simple pratfalls of running into windows and falling from ceilings that are, at best, slightly amusing. It's weak stuff, is what I'm saying.

The efforts to fully convert Lucy are a bit of a mess when Dracula has mind control powers. Including Renfield to try and get rid of the garlic in Lucy's room doesn't provide the hilarity such a diversion should, and it's mostly flat. It's after Lucy dies that the movie actually gains a pretty consistent sense of humor. The staking scene, where Harker gets doused in buckets of blood while Van Helsing hides behind a column, is the funniest the movie gets, but there's also Harker's announcement that he can't enjoy sexual hijinks because he's British. Dracula's seduction of Mina is also more entertaining, using a pair of large dance numbers to accomplish it. It's not hilarious, though the second with the giant mirror showing Mina floating in midair is at least technically accomplished. The final showdown is small and largely just follows through the motions of what's necessary to get the movie to finish.

Is the movie good? A misunderstood piece of hilarity that audiences just couldn't accept at the time? Not really. It has its moments here and there, a lot of them going to Brooks himself, but it's not enough to support the film itself. The lack of a main character undermines the actual storytelling aspect to the point that it becomes like a series of sketches, and it doesn't help that many of the sketches aren't that funny. It did get me to chuckle every now and then, more as the film went along, so I can't exactly hate it.