Dracula II: Ascension

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced screener for this film. I thought the first movie was pretty decent, so I figured the sequel would be pretty much the same. I don't know how the first movie ever went to theatres, because it seemed like a direct-to-video to me, so the two sequels being DTVs don't really make the series any less crappy in my opinion. The movie starts where the last film left off. A group of medical students discover they have a dead vampire in their midst and decide to hide and study the body. They bring Dracula back to life and keep him chained and study him as much as possible, hoping to find the key to eternal life and eventually sell the body to a mysterious buyer. He gets free and causes havoc among the group.

I didn't really know what to expect from this movie. It started off pretty cool introducing the vampire hunter/priest played by Jason Scott Lee. His character is what made the movie. Without him it would have been a pretty dull film; more-so than it already was. I was disappointed by the fact that most of the film was just the group studying Drac and encountering their own little problems. We didn't really get to see any good vamp action until the last 25-30 mins of the film. I guess they are saving all the action for the next movie. There's decent gore; mostly decapitations. The CGI effects looked pretty much like how they did in the first movie, so there's not much difference there. The same director from the first did this film and is doing the next, which is rare when it comes to horror sequels. Normally a different director is used in sequels. It was too bad that they couldn't get the original actor to play Dracula again. There were a number of familiar faces like Roy Scheider (Jaws), Craig Sheffer (Hellraiser: Inferno), and Jason London (The Rage: Carrie 2).

I wanted to give this movie a higher rating, but I was actually a little bored in a lot of parts of the film. I was hoping for more action and it didn't happen until towards the end. At least I was entertained by Jason Scott Lee's character as the priest vampire hunter. On IMDB and on the credits it says that Rutger Hauer plays Dracula, but then it also says that Stephen Billington plays Dracula, so it's a bit confusing, especially considering I don't remember seeing Rutger in the movie at all.

OVERALL

The first wasn't very good to begin with, and this isn't much better. The movie is pretty dull for the most part, because the action doesn't pick up until towards the end. Worth a check if you're a fan of the first.

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