In 1974, when he was at the peak of his powers, Mel Brooks gave us the brilliant Young Frankenstein, a note-perfect parody of the Universal horror films that played as well with mainstream audiences with only the sketchiest knowledge of the 1931 film it was spoofing as it did with die-hard fans who could spot every little reference, every tiny tip of the hat that might escape the attention of the less devoted. In 1995, Brooks brought his increasingly patchy career to a close with a return to the Gothic with the altogether less impressive Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The script, by Brooks, Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman, is still packed with references to the 1931 Dracula (as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s more recent Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)) but it just wasn’t as funny as Young Frankenstein, its accumulation of fan-friendly in-jokes running the risk of alienating those who hadn’t been taking notes on every television screening or home media revisit of Tod Browning’s original film.

The plot remains very close to the story we know and love – In 1893, solicitor Thomas Renfield (Peter MacNicol) visits the castle of Count Dracula (Leslie Nielsen) to finalise his purchase of Carfax Abbey in England. Dracula hypnotises Renfield, enslaving him and returns with him to England, murdering the crew of the ship the Demeter along the way. Renfield is locked up in an asylum run by Doctor Seward (Harvey Korman, Hedley Lamarr in Brooks’ western parody Blazing Saddles (1974)) while Dracula moves into the abbey and ingratiates himself with his new neighbours – Seward, his daughter Mina (Amy Yasbeck), her fiancé Jonathan Harker (Steven Weber) and family friend Lucy Westenra (Lysette Anthony). That night Dracula drinks Lucy’s blood and a puzzled Seward calls on the services of Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Brooks) who reveals that the company has a vampire in their midst. Lucy returns as a vampire, Dracula sets his sights on Mina, and Van Helsing sets out to find and kill the count…

It’s all familiar stuff and six decades on from Bela Lugosi announcing to the world “I am Dracula… I bid you welcome,” the character was ripe with parodic possibility. Sadly, the Brooks of 1995 was a pale shadow of his 1974 self and neither he nor his co-writers manage to pull off the satire anywhere near as effectively as he’d done in Young Frankenstein. Dracula: Dead and Loving It does a very good job of approximating the look of both Browning and Coppola’s films, but seems to somehow miss every opportunity to make anything genuinely funny of them. It relies to readily on slapstick, silly voices and people shouting very loudly instead of anything truly witty or clever.

Peter MacNicol seems to be having a blast, sporting an even less convincing English accent than Keanu Reeves in Bran Stoker’s Dracula but at least he brings a manic energy to his role that most of the rest of the supporting cast can’t muster. Unfortunately, Leslie Nielsen, his straight acting days now long behind him, is at his best when still pretending that he is a straight actor while all around him comic madness reigns – Airplane! (1980), the Naked Gun films and the very short-lived television series they prang from, Police Squad! (1982) being the highlights of his comedy years. It’s his deadpan earnestness than earns him the laughs in those films, the way in which he muddles through the chaos as if nothing is amiss that tickles the funny bone. Here, he’s all too aware that he’s in a spoof and is allowed to camp it up and mug for the camera and it isn’t anyway near as effective. He needed to bring a quiet dignity to the role, to allow Dracula to be superior to the idiots around him but his over-the-top performance robs him of that and with it a lot of the comic potential.

There are a few laughs to be found here and there but for the most part the jokes are older than the Count himself and when delivered in a deliberately arch and knowing way fall just as dead. People fall over a lot, lowbrow gags about sex and bodily fluids are the order of the day (Seward is obsessed with administering enemas) and characters often shout at each other at full volume for no reason at all. One wishes that Brooks had taken aim at Dracula a bit sooner, back when he was making indelible classics like The Producers (1967), Blazing Saddles and of course Young Frankenstein, when he was younger, sharper and wittier.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It was largely savaged by the critics and was a box office flop, barely making back a third of its production budget. The team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker had long since stolen Brooks’ crown as the reigning masters of cinematic parody and Brooks’ style was starting to look a little long in the fang by now. In its wake, Brooks went back to the theatre, producing a successful musical adaptation of The Producers on Broadway and a less successful version of Young Frankenstein in 2007 (a musical based on Blazing Saddles was announced, not least by the characters in Young Frankenstein who, in the final song, announce “next year, Blazing Saddles!” but nothing has yet come of it.) In 2021 it was announced that Brooks would write and producer the television series History of the World, Part II, a follow up to his feature film History of the World, Part I (1981).

One suspect that no-one is desperate for a stage musical based on Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Brooks has shown little interest in working in film since it was released. It really is a terrible missed opportunity that wastes a talented cast and makes one pine for the Brooks of the past, the Brooks who could barely set a foot wrong in the 60s, 70s and into the 80s. And yet for all that – it might still be rather preferable to Coppola’s bloated epic.