Three bumbling, dog-eating graverobbers accidentally awaken a vampire who kills the fat guy and the annoying dude. That leaves the least irritating guy in the bunch to find a Kung Fu master in an underground cave. He begs the master to train him, and he eventually agrees to teach him the art of Kung Fu sorcery necessary to defeat the bloodsucker in the final showdown.
Dragon Against Vampire is one of those Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho joints. Usually, Ho likes to cut and paste two movies together and call it a new feature. This just feels like it was just cut. Very little of it makes sense and the plot jumps around an awful lot. Even though it feels like whole chunks are missing from this thing, it still feels maddeningly long. It may only clock in at 77 minutes, but you’ll swear it’s the same length as the director’s cut of Titanic.
The erratic editing really does it in. Whole sections are nothing more than dream-within-a-dream sequences that are more confusing than anything. The horror elements are really loose too as you have to wait a long time before anything remotely horrific happens. When the horror stuff finally does kick into gear, it’s crammed together in a perplexing fashion. This movie also features a record number of jump scare scenes where a villain hiding just offscreen clamps their hands on someone’s shoulder, and boy, it sure gets annoying fast.
Speaking of annoying, the comic relief shit will get on your nerves almost immediately. I guess that was to be expected in a movie like this, but even the Kung Fu elements are sloppy and rushed. The big training montage is abrupt and the climactic duel between good and evil is completely unsatisfying. I mean for a movie called Dragon Against Vampire, they sure do wait long enough to show the titular confrontation.
It may sound like I’m doing nothing but ragging on Dragon Against Vampire, but it does have one interesting aspect, and that is the vampire is clearly modeled on the western interpretation of the creature. Usually in these things, the vampire hops around in accordance with traditional Chinese folklore. Having a vampire that is more Christopher Lee than Bruce Lee is enough to make it at the very least memorable. That doesn’t make it good though.
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