Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
Source: http://filmeonline365.info/dracula-dead-and-loving-it-1995-film-online-subtitrat-in-romana-dracula-un-mort-iubaret/
Dead and Loving It – Dracula’s comedian act
Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a 1995 satirical comedy horror film directed by Mel Brooks and starring Leslie Nielsen. It is a spoof of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, and of some of the films it inspired. The film follows the classic Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, in its deviations from the novel. Its visual style and production values are particularly evocative of the Hammer Horror films. It spoofed, among other films, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). The story starts when Dracula decides that he wants to make a scenery change and enlists the assistance of his British solicitor (Thomas Renfield) to purchase Carfax Abbey in England, where he ultimately moves. Here, he meets his neighbors: Doctor Seward, Mina (Seward’s daughter), Jonathan Harker (Mina’s fiancée), Lucy (Seward’s ward) and, later on, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (played by Mel Brooks). Following their encounter, a series of tragi-comic (mostly comic) events happen that lead to Dracula’s death, who, in the midst of fighting Seward, Harker and Dr. Van Helsing, is inadvertently killed by Renfield in the final scene.
The depiction of the Romanian land (Transylvania, to be more specifically) at the end of the 19th century in this film is rather grim: the people’s garments, together with their dwellings, look quite medieval. Even though they speak perfect English (although with an accent) and are able to understand and reply to Renfield, they are also depicted as being very superstitious: the people in the same stagecoach with the solicitor are extremely scared of staying out after dark and the stagecoach’ s driver refuses to take Renfield to the castle, where he has an appointment with Count Dracula – whom the villagers are very scared of, since they consider him (and whoever lives there/ at the castle) as being vampires (“children of the night”). They offer Renfield a silver cross, which will protect him of evil, but they also charge him 15 copeics for the said item. In other words, Transylvania is seen as still being quite backwards in terms of the level of civilization and ways of living by other nations, such as the British in this case (whose representative is Renfield). In addition to this, perhaps the funniest fact of this film, is Dracula’s use of the “Moldavian” language: his exchanges of lines in the so-called “Moldavian” with Prof. Van Helsing (who will be the last that will have the final word) are extremely hilarious. In the end, one can say that, despite being a comedy that brings forth an adaptation of a famous legend, the image of the 19th century Romania is how the rest of western, more “civilized” countries saw it at the time: a land of the unknown and of superstitions
