Zoltan: Hound of Dracula is also known as Dracula's Dog. I'm trying to decide which title is better. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula is hilariously goofy, but there's something endearing about the lack of imagination that went into Dracula's Dog. It's a completely utilitarian, no-frills, you-get-what-you-pay-for kind of title. It's like if Halloween was called Killer Guy. Either way, you got a movie about a vampire dog on your hands. That's a hilarious concept, I guess, but many a seemingly can't-fail premise has been torpedoed by faulty execution. Z:HoD might be a tad too normal to really exploit its potential for retardedness. If it had been a little worse, it would have been a lot better.

We open on what is supposed to be some unspecified Cold War-era Eastern Bloc nation, although it looks more like the set of M*A*S*H. There are the same Army surplus trucks and ambulances parked in front of the same scrub-brush California hills that Hollywood used to think could double for pretty much anywhere on earth—or off of it, for that matter. Now that most low-budget production has moved to Ontario or Bulgaria, I kinda miss those ugly, dusty hills. I feel like I spent half of my childhood there, pretending that South Korea and Vulcan both look like Van Nuys. In the opening scene, a bunch of Commies in pea-green uniforms with red patches on the shoulders are dynamiting the dirt for no good reason when they discover an old tomb. In completely unaccented English, they decide to call in an archeologist, so they post a guard to secure the area overnight. This poor dead bastard's not down there five minutes before the earth starts shaking and two of the coffins come crashing out of the wall at his feet. This dude hates living so much that he opens one of them, finding some kind of corpse-shaped thing underneath a sheet with a wooden stake sticking out of it. For some reason, this redshirt with a death wish feels the need to pull the stake out and look at it, as if to verify, "Yup, that's a stake alright." Naturally, this makes Zoltan come back to life and bite the guy in the throat with his big plastic fangs. He's a Doberman with glowy eyes like a cat that I think were achieved by shining a flashlight in his face. He seems to have been dusted over with some kind of powder, because he's kind of gray and ashy all over, like a homeless guy's elbows. He is not scary, like, at all. He'd actually be scarier if he was just a dog, but the stupid Count Chocula fangs hanging out of his mouth make him pretty fucking silly. There are all these slow-mo shots where he's supposed to be, I don't know, snarling or something, but I know a dog yawn when I see one. This mutt isn't evil, he's just sleepy.

Back in the present, Zoltan yanks out the stake from his old owner's chest, and they head out to find a new master. They never explain what happened to Dracula himself, so I'm just going to assume that he was asking for too much money to appear in this picture in more than one scene.

Then famous archeologist Professor Bronco shows up and sees the two empty coffins. He figures out that one of them belonged to Zoltan's owner, an ugly old dude with the awesome name of Fight Schmidt. He doesn't know about Zoltan, though. He just knows that Fight is going to go to America to track down this guy named Michael Drake, the last living descendant of Dracula, so the military dispatches him to the U.S. immediately. Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't make any sense. Why the fuck would the military of an unnamed communist nation give a shit about what happens to some American dude in the middle of the Cold War? That's not really their problem, is it? The vampire, after all, is a symbol of the oppression of the proletariat by the ruling class of wealthy landowners, who literally live off of the blood of the working man. You'd think the Transylvanian military (and, by extension, their Soviet puppetmasters) would be happy that Fight was bringing the bourgeois practice of vampirism to the decadent West, where it would weaken the populace and leave them vulnerable to the inevitable glorious socialist revolution. However, I believe Zoltan: Hound of Dracula takes place during Détente, so perhaps this mission of mercy on the part of Professor Bronco was meant as a display of diplomacy.

Unfortunately, Fight Schmidt was hiding in the shadows of the community college library where the military holds all of its top secret meetings, so he heard the whole conversation about Mike Drake. He immediately puts Zoltan in a crate and hops on a California-bound freighter, where he rents a hearse. How'd he learn to drive? Where'd he get money? How'd he rent a car without credit? Why does he even know that hearses are supposed to be scary? So many unanswered questions with this guy.

Meanwhile, the wayward Dracula scion in question is going camping with his wife, two kids, two German Shepherds, and their two puppies. The whole Drake clan is piled into a Winnebago and motoring off to the lake in an awesome driving montage set to the kind of jazzy cocktail funk that probably plays in all of the elevators on Jupiter. Then they get to the campground and the movie turns into The Hills Have Dogs for a while. Zoltan makes himself an army of local canines to chase around whoever walks off into the darkness to search for somebody, which happens an awful lot. Then Zoltan proves that he's evil by turning one of the puppies into the cutest goddamn vampire you've ever seen. Seriously, you would have no defense against the adorable evil of this wet-nosed, floppy-eared nosferatu.

Then Professor Bronco shows up in an awesome black Caddie convertible and tells Mike Drake the story, which prompts him to say "If what you say is true…" three or four times. Then they sharpen up some stakes and go to war with the pack of devil dogs, which now includes both of the Drake family pets. They eventually manage to stake all of them, but you can imagine the awkward conversation Drake's going to have when he gets home and has to explain to his kids why he had to give both of their dogs to a farm out in the country where they have more room to run and other dogs to play with, and hey, wouldn't you really rather have some hamsters or something? We'll just keep a box of toothpicks next to the cage in case they go vampire on us.

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