New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

For those who don't know, Hellboy is a demon living among the humans of Earth. He has lived among us since he was a baby, so he is similar to humans in nearly every way except in appearance. As part of a secret government agency, he is forced to live under the radar, protecting those he envies until they discover he existence. Since humans aren't always the nicest creatures (anyone who has been to high school knows that), he must decide which side of the multi-realm war his allegiance belongs to: those like him that live under our world or the humans that regard him as a beast. Making this all the more complicated is his human-looking girlfriend, a woman with fire powers who is currently pregnant with his baby, and an underworld prince seeking the power to raise the Golden Army. It's all pretty straightforward once you get into it, but the movie is bigger, has more action, more humor and more of everything you loved about the first Hellboy. Would you expect anything less from a summer sequel?

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

Ok, so Dracula: Dead and Loving It sits at 4% on RottenTomatoes. That's pretty bad, right? Whatever, I once recommended the Power Rangers movie. Now it's time for a slapstick Leslie Nielsen movie. I don't know why so many people poorly reviewed the film (most of the reviews are just a "thumbs down" green splatter, very few actually have comments) but they did. Now it's up to me to help bring the movie up to a whopping 8%. Oh, the silly things I believe in.

So why this movie? Because I grew up watching Leslie Nielsen making a fool of himself. He was the king of spoofing movies back when I thought spoofing was a veritable form of entertainment. This was of course before movies like Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, Dance Flick, Superhero Movie and all the other spoof garbage came out and put the final nails in the spoof coffin. Back before spoofing was just throwing together a bunch of different movies into one, tied together with pop culture references and Simon Cowell look alikes. Leslie Nielsen, though, made spoofing an art form. He was dim witted but funny, his films always held together by some semblance of a plot. They weren't Jim Carrey-level classics, but Nielsen's Naked Gun movies, Spy Hard and Wrongfully Accused were all entertaining to the ten-year-old that I was. But I've since grown up and have developed a whole new set of unreasonable fetishes. HBO's True Blood is one of them, hence my recommendation of Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

The thing about this movie is that it's directed by Mel Brooks, whom I typically cannot stand. Blazing Saddles was a massive disappointment to me. I can't believe how many people I listened to tell me that movie is a "classic". I'm not saying his Dracula spoof is a classic, but I'm also not throwing around big expectations hoping someone blindly follows me. The movie is a retelling of the classic Dracula storyline: Dracula torments some English people, Van Helsing is brought in to get rid of the monster, so on and so forth. With so many failing at producing serious retellings of the vampire, it's nice that someone bothered attempting a spoof. I could watch the little Dracula bat with a big Leslie Nielsen face fly into a window any day. It may not be as funny as The Hangover, but in time that won't be so funny either. Dracula: Dead and Loving It was great when I was a kid and is still moderately entertaining. It sure didn't make me any sicker than I already was. That's got to say something.

Continued:       1       2       3       4