Perhaps because the first film was a failure in its general release, the two sequels downplay a lot of the Christian mythology. Though Mary and Simon pledge to guard against Dracula's recrudescence at the end of 2000, they vanish from the narrative without explanation. Dracula, whose body has been burned by the sun's rays after Mary "hung him out to dry," remains whole enough to be delivered to a morgue in New Orleans. Two morgue-doctors, Elizabeth and Luke, discover that the dead body is that of a vampire when Elizabeth pricks her finger on one of Drac's fangs. After Elizabeth reveals this big secret to her boyfriend Lowell, Lowell talks Elizabeth and Luke into spiriting the body to an out-of-the-way house, so that they and their friends can experiment on the vampire and see if its fluids can be used for curative purposes. It will later be revealed that Lowell, who is handicapped, hopes to use the vampire's essence to cure himself, much as Abraham Van Helsing retarded his aging in the earlier film.
Meanwhile, a kick-ass Catholic priest, Father Uffizi, is on the trail of the reborn Dracula, intending to destroy him and any of his vampiric spawn. In flashbacks he consults with an older priest, and they refer to the Count as "the Betrayer," but no further allusions to the legend of Judas appear here or in the next film. The older priest tells Uffizi that despite the Betrayer's many crimes, the only way to banish his evil is to give him absolution, thus freeing his soul from vampirism-- a very different form of "imitatio Dei" than the one with which the first film concludes.
Elizabeth and her friends experience many problems trying to experiment on Dracula: one friend is killed, Elizabeth becomes bonded to the monster because of receiving his essence through the finger-prick, and one of the experimenters injects himself with Dracula's blood. Luke belatedly has misgivings about trying to profit from the exploitation of ultimate evil, and he finds new ways to bind the vampire with medieval superstitions (faced with a knotted rope, a vampire must undo all the knots; faced with scattered seeds, a vampire must stop to count them all). However, in due time Dracula gets free just as Father Uffizi makes the scene. Elizabeth declares her allegiance to the vampire-lord and the two escape Uffizi, leaving the film on a cliffhanger scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment