Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

Mel Brooks returned to the director's chair in 1995 for a vampire spoof that arrived twenty-one years after Young Frankenstein and found the culture, and the box office, largely indifferent. Leslie Nielsen plays the Count with the same dead-eyed sincerity he brought to the Airplane! cockpit, Peter MacNicol eats insects with alarming commitment, and Brooks himself takes Van Helsing, arguing in Moldavian for the last word. The picture grossed ten million against a thirty million budget and drew an eleven percent score from critics who found it toothless. It is a soft parody, affectionate toward the Hammer films and the 1931 Universal Dracula it mimics, and it asks nothing of its audience beyond a working knowledge of coffin lids and garlic.

The cast is white, the women are victims or seductresses, and the humor is physical. Lucy Westenra spends much of the runtime pale and bedridden before rising as a vampire who tries to seduce her watcher. Mina is hypnotized, drained, and then married off to the surviving fiance. Nobody in the production pauses to interrogate these arrangements, and nobody in 1995 expected them to. Renfield's insanity is a slapstick engine, all bug-eating and manic obedience, never a portrait of a mind worth understanding. There is no environmental lament, no class grievance, no meditation on beauty standards, and no historical revisionism to speak of. Transylvania is a joke about accents. England is a drawing room.

What remains is a comedy of manners with fangs, and its cultural footprint is faint. The progressive sensibilities that would come to dominate studio filmmaking in later decades had no purchase here, and Brooks, a man of an earlier comic tradition, had no interest in supplying them. There is nothing to weigh, nothing to applaud, nothing to argue about. We are left with a mild, amiable spoof that history has filed under late Brooks, alongside a note that the director once shouted at Roger Ebert outside a screening. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds it thin, and sets it down.