“Transylmania” is a pretty much just a waste of time. It rips from better horror comedies and tries in vain to construct something new and fails at every single turn imaginable. Go see “Transylvania Twist,” or “Young Frankenstein,” or “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” or “Hold That Ghost” if you want to view what a true horror comedy is capable of. Hell, go see “Dracula Dead and Loving It” if you want to see a film that never quite manages to make use of its horror farce status but is still ten times better than “Transylmania.” It feels as if they wrote out a story (assuming there is a story) that involved a bunch of moronic college kids going to a foreign country. And then someone along the way figured they’d make some cash off the vampire craze and injected a lot of faux horror themes in to the script.
Because it becomes apparent by the time the film is mid-way that the horror themes are generally an after thought. When the writers are actually focusing on the horror comedy themes most of it is muddled, confusing, and completely hackneyed. There is so much going on that the writers can’t figure out where to focus in on for more than ten minutes. That’s likely because neither premise presented has enough material to fill more than forty five minutes at a time. In probably the most derivative comedy frame of all time, main character Rusty is traveling to Romania to meet up with his gorgeous online girlfriend (nothing can wrong from that plan!) and oddly convinces his entire group of friends to go with him tricking them all in to thinking they’re going to school abroad.
How the hell does he accomplish a feat? You think the writers are going to bother to explain that? Along the way to their creepy castle in Romania to study… something, they realize that all is not as it seems. Well, a few characters realize it. The rest are too stupid to notice anything is going on. Along the way there’s a vampire lord trying to resurrect his sorceress bride, there are vampires turning the students in to their servants, a dwarf house keeper stealing body parts, a gorgeous woman who slays vampires masquerading as a teacher, and none of it even remotely funny, nor does it garner enough focus to make sense. Oh and in a joke that loses its appeal in a matter of seconds, character Rusty’s girlfriend turns out to be a hunchback.
And there are plenty of jokes made about her hump, but no one draws attention to the fact that it’s obviously made of foam whenever it’s touched by someone. ” Transylmania” is a scattered and truly painful mess that goes absolutely nowhere. There are inexplicable events that have no rhyme or reason, hot girls are featured left and right with barely any skin to show for audiences efforts to sit through this garbage, and will someone please alert James DeBello that the erratic spaz character is only going to get him so far as an actor? Ask Matthew Lillard and Jamie Kennedy. It’s really bad, but at least it’s not Friedberg and Seltzer levels of bad. And there’s no bad excuse for watching Jennifer Lyons and Musetta Vander for ninety minutes. This is a movie seemingly with a screenplay that’s constructed of nothing but pure junk that fails to deliver the slightest chuckle during its entire run time. Anyone looking for a good horror spoof best look elsewhere.