Jinga Films, available on DVD and VOD

‘Business is bad.’ 

The original title of this one is The Curse of Valburga, which would make more sense as its connection to Dracula is tenuous at best – and if you’re hoping to catch a glimpse of the Count (or his cousin, who allegedly once lived in Valburga mansion) then don’t hold your breath. I’m not saying he doesn’t show up, it’s just that you’ll be turning blue by that point in the proceedings.

Loser brothers Marjan (Jurij Drevensek) and Borjan (Marko Mandic), who make Dumb and Dumber look like rocket scientists, come up with a hairbrained scheme to fleece tourists one afternoon in a pub. They’ll get mate Ferdo (Ziga Födransperg) to give them access to Valburga and even provide a fake vampire for people to get excited about while they’re taking them round on an ill-conceived ‘Tourist Tour’.

To begin with things don’t go too badly, mainly because the clientele are either half-cut or distracted – like a guy called Vasily (Luka Cimpric) who is trying to film some kind of porn movie with the girls he’s brought along. But there are a couple of Goth Girls in black leather and fishnets who’ve brought with them an ancient tome, and a tattooed guy called Sven (Niklas Kvarforth) looking for something called the ‘Eye of the Baron’ in order to raise demons. And then someone starts taking out the visitors in various gruesome ways. Is it the Count (or the ‘Cu*t’ as one of the foreigners insists), or something else? Something even more deadly?

It’s hard to know what the makers of this one were aiming for, really. What you’re expecting to be a vampire romp (someone keeps asking ‘Where are the vampires?’; it’s a good question) soon descends into mindless violence and gore for the sake of gore, with cannibalism and torture porn the order of the day. Perhaps they were trying to hark back to the era of European schlock and exploitation, but the nostalgic charm of those kinds of flicks is almost totally absent here. There are no characters you find yourself rooting for, as huge chunks of the movie are devoted to the cast running up and down steps Benny Hill style. The dialogue is on the level of ‘My anal hole is always ready’ or ‘Something in the darkness took her’ when it’s broad daylight. And the stabs at giving this whole farce some kind of mythology seem to hinge on vague explanations about a German invasion and pictures in crayon that look like a five year-old did them.

Verdict: It’s entertaining in a masochistic way, I guess, if you can get past the annoying soundtrack, but only to see how the next awful grotesque gets theirs. Disappointing. ‘He is not normal!’ 4/10                            

Paul Kane

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