Arriving two months late and many dollars short for the easy-to-please Halloween juvenile demographic, this atrocious lowbrow spoof concerns a bunch of sex-drugs-party U.S. college students who attend a university in Romania (shot on location, evidently) so one nerdy horndog can hook up with the comely Transylvanian wench he’s met and masturbated to on the web. The young Americans tangle with assorted gothic-horror and teen-idiocy clichés — a dwarf-mad-scientist dean, a vampire coven, possession by an ancient sorceress, reality-TV shows, horse farts, sex manuals, a gay student in deep denial etc. If any movie in particular seems parodied, it’s Van Helsing, and nobody can deny that one doesn’t deserve a stake-through-the-heart skewering. Some of this crap might have been funny, if the filmmakers had some finesse with comedic timing, milieu or storytelling. As it is, the best joke is about MapQuest, and if you blink you’ll miss it (blink twice and you’ll miss Transylmania’s very limited release). Stick with Mel Brooks or Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. *
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2009.