The Sins of Dracula (2014) Horror Comedy

The Sins of Dracula (2014) -  After actress Sarah Nicklin followed me on Twitter I decided that looking into her filmography might be interesting. So after asking her what her favorites were and ordering, The Disco Exorcist (2011), Nun of That (2008) and Exhumed (2011) from Amazon I pulled up amazon prime to see what I could see for free. Choosing the Sins of Dracula , the service thinks I will rate it 2.5 stars, or is that what other people rate it? It has 6.8 stars on IMDB but since the average rating seems to be a seven on that site I couldn't put too much faith in that. A horror comedy it starts with the horror making it seem that it might be a slasher. It starts classically enough with a actor coming to a theater for a call back only to be axed to death.
  Cut to Billy (Jamie Dufault), a religious young man who wants to expand beyond his choir singing so joins his girlfriend Shannon (Sarah Nicklin) at her local community theater group. What a group it is with an exaggerated cast of cliche misfits, NuWave (Jesse Dufault) a politically charged nonconformist, Traci (Samantha Acampora) the Dungeons and Dragons big glasses gamer nerd, Marty the awkwardly shy gay guy Scott (Johnny Sederquist), and Bandilli (Derek Laurendeau) the sometimes off his meds schizophrenic.  Shannon is the girl next store and Billy the sheltered Christian about to have his worldview expanded. Outcast joining together to learn from each other bring their unique abilities to make theater.
  The Director Lou Perdition (Steven O'Broin) arrive so over the top with his poser lead actress Kimberly (Elyssa Baldassarri) the pretty much you need to throw the idea that this film is taking itself seriously and think of it more as satire. The new show is something cutting edge and after a Jonestown Jubilee about the mass suicide at the James Jones compound. The overacting even when viewed as comedy is challenging to listen to. He is the antagonist though and antagonize he does.
  A Christian based yearn of about staying true to your beliefs and the consequences of failing, mixed with a sort of horror theme of raising Dracula (Michael Thurber) by covering his remains in sinful blood. There are certainly many bits that are amusing, like Billy spending a way too much thought in a monologue to convince himself that premarital sex is what God wants.  Still after setting up that Dracula has been raised and the moral personal choice Billy makes we have a third act goes even way further. With Dracula raised from the grave and turning many a theater geek into his vampire minions it is up to Shannon, Billy, Rev Johnson and this other exorcism priest.(that's a question why?) to deal with the vampire outbreak. We learn a minor character in Rev. Johnson (Carmine Capobianco) is a descendant of the Van Helsing family which comes out of no where abut makes possible the last joke of the movie.
  That other priest played by Jose Guns Alves did not make a lot of sense in the film, almost like the story needed an extra seven minutes so the director Richard Griffin and writer Michael Varrati  pulled it together at the last minute. Like an earlier nod to Salem's Lot this ode to The Exorcist (1973) played hard for comedy and probably done better other places like by Leslie Nielsen in Repossessed (1990) as well as in one with I think with James Woods as the Priest in Scary Movie 2 (2001) so probably could have been left out and does not have a meaningful context to the rest of the film.
  Overall there were a few amusing parts but this film suffers by having characters that are too cliche, although the Tracie character was very amusing in her monologues. Still it just felt like the film maybe changed a lot from its original draft with this and that added to from the second to third act. I don't know but although there are some funny bit I don't really think I will recommend this on. I do love the New England connection being a Dot Rat in my youth but there just wasn't quite enough funny or enough scary to get past the cliche.
As I have done so far this year; I am doing as an experiment my Twitter account @Soresport is dedicated to following and being followed by people in and behind the scenes. Then I am also hoping some of them follow me back. I do fear that Twitter has become too much of a promotional tool for people in film to actually get those follow backs but hey its an experiment. This one is a a bit in reverse, Sarah Nicklin followed me on Twitter prompting me to start looking into what she has performed in. Thanks to her in proactively helping my little experiment along.