With Dracula, Luc Besson stakes his claim on the greatest vampire story ever told. Leaning hard on the “romance” angle, much of it plays like a remake of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula with sporadic infusions of French camp.

In a war-torn prologue, Prince Vlad (Caleb Landry Jones, Antiviral) loses his wife (Zoë Bleu, 2017’s The Institute) to enemy Turkish forces. Vlad’s so despondent, he renounces God by plunging the local cardinal’s scepter into the cardinal — thus becoming eternal, I guess? Origins don’t matter here; we know Dracula.

What really matters is four centuries later, a priest (Christoph Waltz, also in 2025’s Frankenstein) investigates the source of female vampires around Paris, while dandy realtor Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid, TV’s Andor) attempts to do business with the owner of a spooky castle. That would be Vlad, of course, looking every bit his age, complete with a Gary Oldman granny updo. And when Vlad meets Harker’s striking fiancée (also Bleu), the blood-spitting image of his late wife … well, you know the rest.

So why watch? Besson, of course. From the slickness of La Femme Nikita to the grit ofThe Professional and beyond, his films shine with lush, visual opulence, regardless of genre. Every detail matters, and when Vlad says, “This battle will be bloody, your eminence,” prior to donning animalistic armor, you know Besson will not cut a corner. His Dracula, like Coppola’s, is an all-out epic, but with squatty stone gargoyles as meal-serving henchmen, Waltz tussling with a beheaded maiden, and a dance number ensuing when Vlad applies the 19th-century version of Sex Panther cologne.

And then there’s Jones. His wispy, near-translucent ginger mustache and pasty white skin don’t exactly scream “irresistible,” yet turns out, his unique look and naturally unnerving presence make him excellent oddball casting. Leather britches, lanky frame and all, he’s the heroin-chic Drac. —Rod Lott

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It’s the first night on the job for Edward (Paul Syre, Chop Chop). The former Marine is pulling late-shift security at Wilshire Infirmary, a former psych hospital set for demolition. And as his supervisor (Mark Anthony Williams, Phat Girlz) informs him, the docs who used to run the place were into some freaky shit.

Like what? Oh, like experimenting with transferring patients’ minds into mannequins. Yep, Edward: Orientation is gonna be quite the bitch.

With that setup, I was game for first-timer Nicholas Pineda’s Infirmary, depicted through surveillance and body cameras. It’s unable to pay off, however. A pulse barely registers.

Hey, I get it: Flickering lights, power outages, creaking doors — they’re used so much in low-budget found footage because they’re cheap, if not free. But outside of middle-school sleepover pranks, they’re just not scary or effective. Plus, when you begin with a title card informing viewers two people were found deceased, and you introduce essentially a cast of three, we don’t exactly have to play Poirot.

Worse, the acting is pretty poor. Out of inexperience rather than incompetence, Syre can’t convincingly act lost in Wilshire’s maze of lookalike hallways, and poor Williams seems to have been told to improv what Samuel L. Jackson might be like if he just wanted to nap. I hate to say it, but I nearly joined him. —Rod Lott

Built by the U.S. military for defense, an animatronic Santa Claus goes haywire to turn homicidal on Christmas Eve. Why? Like the old joke about a dog licking its testicles, because it can.

And also because Joe Begos’ movie is titled Christmas Bloody Christmas, shot through a head-shop haze. 

The Final Girl of this self-knowing slasher is Tori (Riley Dandy, 2022’s Interceptor), owner of a record store patronized by hipsters. After a night of liquor and oral, she and cashier Robbie (Spiderhead’s Sam Delich, here a dead ringer for John Oates), find themselves targeted by the fire ax-wielding RoboSanta+ (a mute and committed Abraham Benrubi, The Belko Experiment).

Bloody’s highlight arrives all too early as we see the robotic Kris Kringle awaken through its POV, each metallic boot step clunking as it hunts its first fornicating victims. From there to the bitter end, when RoboSanta’s green laser eyes come in handy, Begos (Almost Human) hasn’t supplied a story to hold attention between slaughters. He opts for that laziest of indie-horror solutions: time-biding NSFW conversations, from Robbie telling his boss to “flick your bean” to a toy store employee ordering her boyfriend to “eat my ass out” — all so utterly uhh-noy-ing and free of imagination, you’ll root for RoboSanta just to be done with the thing.

Fatally pitched as a Silent Night, Deadly Night reboot, Christmas Bloody Christmas seems conceived as a seasonal Terminator parody. That kernel of an idea is all Begos has, though, short-circuiting any chances of holiday horror immortality. —Rod Lott

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Henry Primo’s turning a suh-weet 16! And thanks to his wealthy parents, he’s throwing quite the rager at a local motel, complete with live band, swimming pool and rented rooms. Maybe — just maybe — Henry (Randy Ackerman) will finally get that cute Becky (Laura Sellers) into the (possibly bedbug-ridden) sack.

Or perhaps Henry’s drink will be drugged, causing him not to pass out, but to slaughter seven classmates. After all, the movie under examination is called Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday, suggesting creator Mark Mason (2003’s The Prize Fighter) couldn’t pick between two titles, so he used both.

Fast-forward 15 years, the now-obese adult Henry (Mason himself) and his Hannibal Lecter half-face mask are discharged from a high-security loony bin to his parents’ home. They’ve “spared no expense” to turn a wing of their abode into a replica of the mental hospital for Henry’s comfort. Because he no longer speaks, Henry communicates solely via pen and paper, like when he’s hungry and writes, “BIG MACS.” His mother asks, “How many?” and he responds with the number “8.”

Perhaps his atrocious dietary requests fuel his ESP abilities? Yes, Henry also possesses the power of ESP. It never comes into play.

Well, Mom and Dad must have skimped on something in the security features, because police are called to investigate a message left on the now-married Becky’s front door … in his own poop: “BECKY WHY DID DO THIS ME.” So many words scrawled so large must have required a great deal of fecal matter, but remember: eight Big Macs. The math tracks. (Plus, this thing was shot in Tulsa, in a state with an obesity rate near 40%.)

Anyway, everyone’s on edge until Henry saves a little girl from a dog mauling and all is forgiven. Naturally, his former classmates — well, the surviving ones — decide to bestow him with an award of courage at the high school reunion. This goes over great until Kizay (Tom Wescott), the Mickey-slipper from the jinxed birthday party, is able to surreptitiously attach jumper cables to Henry’s wheelchair, shocking him into a hulking monster of rage that no amount of all-beef patties can pacify.

You can’t blame Mason for trying. But you can blame him for failing. He’s not just the “star” of Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday, but also its producer, editor, writer, director and, somehow, second-unit director. —Rod Lott

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Through camcorder footage, Home Movie follows the foibles of the Poe family from Halloween to Easter. Shortly after moving to their wooded Connecticut home, Claire (celebrated soap star Cady McClain) and David (Adrian Pasdar, House of Frankenstein 1997) notice their children (real-life siblings Austin and Emily Joy Williams) aren’t acting like their usual selves.

Like how, you ask? Like throwing rocks. Like not using their words. Like … well, as Claire records on her video diary, “Yesterday morning, the 25th of December … Christmas … Jack and Emily crucified the family cat.” Ho-ho-holy shit, kids!

That’s small stuff compared to the rest. Although Shutter Island actor Christopher Denham’s first feature as writer and director breaks no ground, especially for the found-footage subgenre, he does two things really right. The first is how differently Claire and David — respectively, a child psychologist and a pastor — approach possible solutions to their offspring’s disturbing behavior: She hopes to prescribe an answer; he spritzes holy water and shouts commands at imagined demons.

And the second is how Denham doesn’t wuss out on taking his established dark path to its logical end, making the down and dirty Home Movie mean-spirited in the best of ways. The last 15 minutes are something else, with a final shot dripping in hand-wringing eeeevilllll. It almost makes up for Pasdar’s Annoying Dad with No Off Switch routine, what with his silly voices, cartoon accents and more fart talk than the annual convention of the American College of Gastroenterology. —Rod Lott

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