Whenever America becomes obsessed with something, there are side effects. When we went nuts for Pirates a couple of years ago, for instance, the market was suddenly and inexplicably flooded with pirate-themed porn movies. And now we’re obsessed with vampires and since vampire porn has already been around for awhile, the side effects look more like this: Transylmania. It’s not so much a movie as a collection of whatever is left over after you’ve run out of ideas but still want to put something up on screen. So you throw in a bunch of used up college kid stereotypes (you know who I mean, they all have names like “Wang” or “Newmar”), have them wave their dicks around, and then expect that to be funny. You drop them in a stupid, poorly thought out situation, and then hire a bunch of chicks willing to show their boobies and have them all smoke pot. The result is usually yet another direct to DVD National Lampoon movie but in this case, probably just because if features vampires, somehow this one got a theatrical release.
So here we are watching Transylmania and regretting it. In its best moments it becomes Harold and Kumar Go To Transylvania, but those moments are fleeting and in the end they’re still based on ideas stolen from better movies. The production design is far less cheap than you’d expect, you have to give them that. It’s the actors who are made out of cardboard, not the sets. When sex-crazed idiot Rusty (Oren Skoog) convinces hi college friends to spend a summer studying abroad in Romania, it might seem stupid but at least it does sort of feel like they actually went somewhere. They show up and it’s creepy. There’s a castle and a collection of frightened villagers. They’re oblivious to any of this, of course. The boys are too busy lusting after drugs and whores, whilethe girls are blow up doll bimbos who only exist to satisfy men, so of course they don’t have any thoughts in their head.
But Rusty and his friends have shown up at the wrong time. The vampire count Radu (who for no particular reason looks exactly like Rusty) has just returned and he’s looking for a magical music box which will awaken his long dead love. In the mix there’s also a vampire huntress, who’s out for blood and a diminutive school headmaster who resorts to torture and Frankenstein-like experiments to aid his humpbacked daughter. The kids will, of course, fail to notice any of this since they’re much too busy looking for an orgy.
I have the disturbing feeling that I may have actually made some of this seem funny. Hey I love a good college raunch-comedy as much as the next guy and combining it with a horror film might be a good idea, some day. This isn’t that day. Transylmania’s characters are intensely irritating and its comedy is so obvious that you’ll see the film’s limp attempts at jokes coming a mile away. If there’s a bright spot anywhere in it, maybe it’s Natalie Garza playing a duel role as twin sisters. She seems to have a little life behind her eyes, even when she’s forced to perform as a severed head. That’s more than I can say for anyone else in this movie. Don’t let Transylmania suck the life out of you.
