Greetings. "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" (1995) is an underrated, often overlooked film in Mel Brooks' filmography. Not a box office success, and routinely trashed in reviews, my own opinion is that the film was just too unusual to appeal to mainstream audiences at the time.

Starring Leslie Nielsen as Dracula, Mel Brooks as Van Helsing, and many other familiar comedy names, the film is not really a slapstick parody in the vein of "Young Frankenstein" that Brooks made over two decades earlier -- but another Young Frankenstein is almost certainly what audiences expected.

While there are puns throughout, Dracula: Dead and Loving It plays the Universal/Hammer version of the Dracula story relatively straight, making the film difficult to characterize. The first clue that this will be the case is literally in the opening credits, which feature an array of classic Gothic vampire-related illustrations both sexually charged and in some cases quite morbid. An unusual opening for a comedy film.

In some ways the closest similar film to this might be "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967) -- one scene involving a large mirror in Dracula: Dead and Loving It could be viewed as a direct homage to a scene in Vampire Killers (though literally in reverse!). Another film sometimes mentioned in this genre is "Love at First Bite" (1979), which is a funny film to be sure, but since it involves a vampire in New York City during the Disco era, has very little relationship to the original source material.

In any case, no matter what the critics have said over the years, on balance I like Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and it's worth watching. It's currently available free on #YouTube Movies and TV (at least in the U.S.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O4eaxJJ-Pc

Enjoy. -L