Killer Barbys vs. Dracula (2002) User Reviews (10)

Jesus Franco doing what he is best at; making an awful movie!

[Boba_Fett1138 · 2/10 · 20 August 2011]

First of all, this movies doesn't even have anything to do with the earlier movie "Killer Barbys", which also got directed by Jesus Franco. So this is not even really a sequel but what is way worse is that this movie is absolutely torture to watch, especially when compared to the somewhat bearable first movie "Killer Barbys".

Was there even supposed to be a plot in all of this? The movie is filled with lots of random characters, doing all random things, without ever anything feeling connected to each other. If there was a story in all of this they sure did a great job at hiding it from me.

I'm convinced of it that Jesus Franco keeps putting his wife Lina Romay in his movies just to annoy me. She is so incredibly irritating and pointless in this movie and she still can't act, despite of all of her years of experience within the business. The only character and actor that I liked in this was Dan van Husen, who played his role in a fun way. But even his role feels incredibly pointless!

Guess this movie foremost serves as a promotion for the Spanish punk band The Killer Barbies. The movie is filled with sequences in which they perform some of their songs, which serves no purpose at all within the movie. And I must say, I was still kind of digging their music in the 1996 movie "Killer Barbys" but in this one it has gotten way worse and their music sounded far their formulaic. Guess that The Killer Barbies just have gotten worse over the years, which must be also the reason why they agreed to do another movie with Jesus Franco. They must have been really desperate to do so!

The title and premise of this movie still sound like it's at least somewhat fun to watch but believe me, it really isn't. Because of the pacing and its incredibly bad story you'll loose interest completely, well before the movie hits the half hour mark. The movie does get worse as it progresses and I feel even somewhat reluctant to actually call this a movie. It does so much wrong and poorly that this doesn't even feel like a movie. It's just one big ugly mess, in which nothing makes sense.

Congratulations Jesus Franco, you have done it again. You have succeeded once more in making one of the absolute worst movies out there!

2/10

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Barbys return!

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 14 February 2022]

The Killer Barbies - remember when they did Killer Barbys with Franco? - play Tivoli World, which was the largest theme park in Costa del Sol, a Wild West-themed place that sadly closed due to the coronavirus in 2020.

They're soon met by two Russians - Irina (Lina Romay) and Ivan - who have brought the dead body of Dracula for the theme park. But after hearing the band play - and look, let's be honest, if you were a vampire and Silvia Superstar was performing in front of your coffin, you'd rise from the grave too - Dracula is back and the park's owners call in Dr. Seward, a vampire killer, as the undead lord of the manor of Carpathia starts killing everyone.

You know, I kind of like the music of the Barbys and they even play that song "Candy" that Iggy Pop and Kate Pearson did. It's all pretty silly. That said, it's a lot of fun. Carmen Montes from Snakewoman does some dancing and Katja Bienert from Linda and Eugenie (Historia de una perversión) is in this too, which makes me super happy. In fact, let's just all live in this world, where there's amusement park rides, silly horror pop and goofy Dracula running around.

Killer Barbys vs. Dracula: Somehow even worse than the first film

[Platypuschow · 1/10 · 24 October 2017]

Six years after the mess that was Vampire Killer Barbys (1996) Jess Franco returns. Perhaps someone made a bet with him that he couldn't make a worse film than that!? Franco furthers the blotch on his legendary record with one of the worst films I've seen in a good decade. It's hard to believe he had anything to do with this.

The previous movie was bad but it followed your general formula and was at least watchable. Here there is barely a plot, the movie is full of random events, random sound effects and random coloured filters which make the whole thing even worse.

Silvia Superstar at least returns but oddly playing a different character, which is just yet another weird decision that makes this film so insanely bad.

I'm sure you could make some great drinking games out of this movie, but for entertainment you shall find none.

The Good:

Silvia Superstar is great

The Bad:

Awful cast/character decisions

SFX are awful

Dracula is embarrassing

Dreadful cinematography

Bizarre sound work

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

The Killer Barbys are a real band and this was the absolute worst way to showcase them

If you played a drinking game where you take a shot every time something makes no sense, every time there is a sound effect or light filter that doesn't fit the film..............you'd be dead within moments of the opening credits.

Vampire with an awful childhood

[unbrokenmetal · 5/10 · 20 October 2003]

In a Wild West park in southern Spain, a rock band called KILLER BARBIES is playing a bunch of shows. Many strange characters hang around, including a guy who claims to be Count Dracula. Then, a government official from Transylvania arrives - and in the back of her car is the glass coffin with the real Dracula. He is meant to be become a tourist attraction, but soon is back from the dead after listening to the Killer Barbies' tune `Wake Up'. He gets obsessed with Silvia, the singer of the Killer Barbies. Lots of necks and bites later, the vampire hunter Dr Seward comes into town to fight the evil undead. Unfortunately, Seward is blind and the villagers doubt that he is able to stop Dracula. But if he can't, who else could?

Well, you knew from the title it wouldn't be Shakespeare! But the movie has got a legendary director (Jess Franco) and three excellent veteran actors from the late 60s spaghetti westerns (Aldo Sambrell, Peter Martell and Dan van Husen) who raise the whole undertaking above the level of a normal rock band trash video. I must confess I am not a big fan of the kind of music that the Killer Barbies play. It sounds rather like tame pop than aggressive punk to me, but I still could sit the movie through without being bored for a minute. Silvia's skull bikini helped, too. The best fun moment was when one victim asked the vampire with her last breath: `Why are you such a bastard?', and Dracula replies: `I had an awful childhood!'

Just like in his 70s vampire movies like `Vampyros Lesbos', Franco is not afraid of showing a vampire with a mirror image, or letting him walk in the sunshine. Surprisingly for a Spanish director, his idea of a vampire was hardly influenced by the typical Catholic iconography. Franco's vampires are described as outsiders neither bound by a particular morality code nor weaknesses such as fearing the sign of the cross. This horror comedy works by the same rules as Franco's serious movies here, but unfortunately, the visual style doesn't come anywhere near. Especially towards the end, cheap video effects like the so-called solarisation don't really serve a purpose. The speed of the finale made me aware that the movie also had a couple of pacing problems in the middle, probably because Franco never was a comedian in the first place. Voting more than 5/10 would seem unfair to Franco's masterpieces such as `Virgin Among the Living Dead' therefore - although `Killer Barbys vs Dracula' is quite some fun!

Poor Sequel

[Michael_Elliott · 8 March 2008]

Killer Barbys vs. Dracula (2002)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Jess Franco's follow up to his 1996 film Killer Barbys features the rock group accidentally bringing Count Dracula back to life. The first film was decent, comic book style fun but this one here doesn't quite reach that level. Franco is basically making a music video for the rock group who I've heard is quite popular in Spain but their alternate/punk rock just doesn't cut it for me. Franco was clearly going for an Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein type feel but only a few gags work. There's some funny dialogue including one scene where a reporter asks Dracula if he's ever infected Aids and another where one woman, before dying, asks Dracula why he's a mean bastard and he replies that he had a bad childhood.

beyond the valley of Franco

[zuccozoid · 1/10 · 19 September 2008]

There was a time when Franco at least tried to make entertaining movies - always sloppy (he'd shoot lots of loose footage, then resell/repackage the same stuff to different distributors under different titles); but this is even worse than Lust For Frankenstein - just a cheap amateur whack-job shot on camcorder by high school students.

At least Ed Wood tried to make "important" movies - but he had a terribly overinflated sense of himself, and unfortunately - no talent.

Franco has talent, and occasionally employs it, but he IS a sleaze and cheese (and he's no Joe D'Amato!) Franco's best films are the most misogynistic: SADOMANIA, BARBED WIRE DOLLS, WOMEN IN CELL BLOCK 9, THE DEMONS and EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN - any of which you should watch before dumpster-diving into his many, many other duds.

For the love of GOD!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

[Canadria · 1/10 · 14 July 2006]

There comes a point in every man's life when he must decide whether to gouge out his own eyes with a dull and fiery hot spoon ... or watch this movie.

I wish I had taken the 1st option.

In fact, I wish that I had more than 1 set of eyes to gouge out.

I once thought that it would be fun to try to see the worst movie ever made. I believe now that I have. This movie is not even bad in a fun way, it's just bad.

At one point, I thought that maybe this movie was meant to showcase the talent of the Killer Barbies (Note: the movie spells their name wrong). I tried to find the talent they were showcasing, and it too was terrible.

Transylvania's culture minister brings the real Drakula to a fun-park in Spain to prove that the "Drakula" working there is an impostor.

[daniel5-1 · 1/10 · 4 August 2006]

I have hardly ever seen a movie of such low quality. It's nice to see actors like Peter Martell making movies again, but this movie unfortunately seems not to have had a script or an original idea. Not to talk about the camera work (probably a first time operator, at least I hope so), although the "day for night" they invented for this movie is shockingly interesting (I understood this only after the first half of the movie and when I mentioned it to the others watching the movie I could see that no one had understood the purpose of this strange color effects before). The film looks like high school kids tried to make something funny and transgressive, but did not dare to really do so. I must see some of Jess Francos older movies because he must have made something better before otherwise he could not be working anymore.

Latter day bubble-gum rock romp from Uncle Jess.

[parry_na · 5/10 · 21 June 2019]

This, the sequel to the 'Vampire Killer Barbys' travelogue-style curio, comes 6 years after the original: time that has seen a further reduction in the typical budget of a typical Jess Franco film. As far as I can tell, only Billy King returns to play the same character as he did in the first film, although saucy Sylvia Superstar and the excellent Aldo Sambrell (in his last film) also return, playing different people.

We're also joined here by Franco muse, the tireless Lina Romay as no-nonsense party-pooper Camarada Irina, and former underage ingénue Katja Bienert as Katia. Katia interviews various characters (including fake Dracula Peter Martell), but not The Killer Barbys, indicating her scenes might well have been shot independently from much of the film.

The afore-mentioned Dracula pretender is probably the most interesting character here. Full of indignant protests that he is the REAL Count, Martell's cadaverous appearance works well wrapped in dark clothes and cape. He isn't concerned with being out in daylight, but you wouldn't expect him to be. There are even echoes of John Carradine about him.

All this is scuppered when the real Dracula (Kike Sarasola) turns up. It turns out he is a fan of bubble-gum pop, which is just as well, because this film is interspersed with many 'live' numbers from The Killer Barbys, or what remains of their number. Dracula is also unconcerned about appearing in sunlight, although the video filters added to some of his scenes might just be attempting to convince us night has fallen; it is difficult to tell. There's a blind Doctor 'Seaward' character (Dan van Hussen), and even Bela Lugosi gets a mention. But we aren't encouraged to worry too much about any of that - this is strictly superficial, one-shot silliness and pretends to be little else. Unlike the earlier film, there is no nudity and very little sexual suggestion (although there are a few expletives in the dubbed dialogue), indicating the project has been directed towards juveniles. Again, it is difficult to tell. Who cares really? As for the songs - I've heard a lot worse, which is just as well, because there are a lot of them.

Apart from directing, Franco also co-writes this (alongside Romay and José Roberto Vila). My score is 5 out of 10.

An interesting cast, but otherwise strictly amateur hour for Jess Franco

[lazarillo · 12 May 2009]

It's ironic a director like Jess Franco who has been making films for more than forty years now has been reduced to the kind of ultra-low-budget, shot-on-video projects like this usually associated with first-time amateurs. It's also ironic that the guy that once helmed what was supposed to be the definitive version of Bram Stokers "Dracula" with Christopher Lee (although many of Lee's Hammer Dracula movies were vastly superior to Franco's 1969 version) would make something like this that is laughably bad even for a spoof.

For no apparent reason, a woman (Lina Romay) has brought Dracula's coffin to a Spanish western theme park where the Killer Barbys (a punk band that kind of resembles an Iberian version of The Cramps) are performing. "Dracula" awakens and puts the bite on the park's fake Dracula and a pesky reporter (Katja Beinert) before becoming infatuated with the Barby's lead singer, Sylvia Superstar (can't really blame him there). This is actually a better vehicle for the Barbys than their first collaboration with Franco. They get to play a lot more of their music, which may not be to everyone's taste, but is FAR better than their acting. And Sylvia Superstar certainly adds a lot of sex appeal with her husky Spanish accent and her ridiculously skimpy wardrobe. This is good because otherwise there is a real lack of anything resembling sex or nudity --and a Franco film without sex and nudity is like a tall glass of water without the water.

Lina Romay, Franco's wife and long-time collaborator, actually keeps her clothes on for a change, which is probably for the best as she was pushing fifty here. It's interesting to see Katja Beinert, who was kind of the German version of Traci Lords in the early 80's, except that instead of appearing in actually pornography, she only appeared in several sleazy Franco "nudie" movies and a couple German "schoolgirl report" films. Like Traci Lords, Beinert apparently STOPPED doing nude scenes when she turned 18, but the bigger problem in this movie perhaps is her ridiculous reporter character who interviews everybody (the fake Dracula, the real Dracula, etc) EXCEPT the Killer Barbys. This might be because her scenes seem to have been shot almost completely separately from everybody else's. The same is true of the great Spaghetti western character actor Aldo Sambrelli who is totally wasted here as an elderly suitor of Silvia Superstar (trust me, she would probably kill the old guy in thirty seconds if he actually got her into bed).

This movie definitely has an interesting cast, but otherwise it is strictly amateur hour for Franco.