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Almost
every modern Dracula retelling includes some kind of flashback to the
vampire's origin, which is more or less tragic depending on whether he's
the hero of the story. Now, with Dracula Untold, we've finally got an entire movie devoted to the undeath of Transylvanian prince Vlad Tepes — and it's cheesy as hell.
Probably
the most intriguing part of this reboot, for fans of the original novel
and all its myriad remakes throughout the past century, is the way this
film turns its evil, fanged impostor into a hero. Not to put too fine a
point on it, the answer is a racism update. Bram Stoker's original
Victorian novel was a swashbuckling anti-immigrant tale. It was
explicitly about how those creepy Eastern Europeans were buying up
British real estate and turning all the nice Western women into blood
whores. Most early Dracula movies, including the classic 1931 version
with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, conflate the monster's foreignness
with his undeadness. Even the classic "I vant to suck your blud" joke is
about Dracula's accent, not his taste for eating people.
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But
the hatred of Eastern European immigrants became less relevant as time
wore on. Eventually, as actors like young Frank Langella and Gary Oldman
inhabited the role, the monster was rehabilitated as a handsome
stranger whose foreign origins added to his gothic appeal. Still, if
you're going to reinvent the monster as a full-blown hero, star of what
the studio is claiming will be a new Universal monster franchise,
he can't just be a sexy outsider with a charmingly dilapidated castle.
We need to bring back the original racist frisson of Stoker's novel.
That's why Vlad Tepes in Dracula Untold has to be fighting Muslims. Because of course.
In
this version of the story, Transylvania is under attack by Mehmed, the
Turkish Sultan's military leader. And nothing could be more upsetting to
old Vlad than to find Turks on his land. That's because when Vlad was a
child, the Sultan demanded tribute in the form of strapping young boys
to fill out his troops — and Vlad's father handed his son over to the
Turkish, to be raised alongside Mehmed in the Ottoman Empire's army. Of
course, Vlad was the biggest badass the Turks had ever seen, which is
how he became known as "the Impaler."
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Now
he's been allowed to return home to his family, his military service
over. Unfortunately, the Sultan is looking for troops again, and he's
demanding 1,000 boys (including Vlad's son). Which is why Vlad decides
he needs a supernatural power-up from a mythical blood-sucker living in
the mountains above his castle. Turns out that Tywin Lannister is up
there, vamping it up in every sense of the word, and he offers Vlad a
bargain. He'll give Vlad some vampire juice so he can be superpowered
for three days, and Vlad will return to being human if he can resist
drinking somebody else's warm, tasty blood.
Plus, the
bloodlust! Will Vlad be able to control it, even when he's wearing his
awesome dragon armor and seeing little pulsing veins in everybody's
throats?
By
the film's end, Dracula is living in the modern world and has been
thoroughly rehabilitated as the good guy of his story. We know that he
vamped out to save his people from the evil Muslims, not to satisfy some
sadistic urge. Plus, when Vlad has a conversation with Mehmed, he's got the British accent and the Turk has an accent that sounds ridiculously similar to Lugosi's in Dracula 83 years ago. Oh Hollywood, you are so sneaky with your racialized monster switcheroo!
That said, you can't really have a better B-movie experience than Dracula Untold.
Like the very best bad movies, it's full of nonsensical action, funny
one-liners, and unreflectively reproduces the prejudices of its time.
You may be snorting at the whole "actually the Turks were the bad guys"
thing, but you'll never be bored.
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