Dracula 3000

The movie opens with Casper van Dien, aka Abraham van Helsing, piloting his futuristic deep space salvage ship, "Mother III," around the cosmos when it comes across an abandoned ship, the "Demeter," that's been drifting about for the past fifty years. As he sets a course we are introduced to the other members of what must be the most ridiculously inept crew of any space ship, ever:

• Captain Abraham van Helsing (Dien), a white male with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever.
• Vice-Captain Aurora (Eleniak), a platinum blonde who appears to be getting too old for this shit, and displays it by being a giant bitch for no apparent reason. And what the fuck is a Vice Captain?
• Mina, the intern. For some unexplained reason, deep space salvage ships have summer interns. I think a more likely explanation is that the actress is actually a real intern that they threw into the movie in order to circumvent union regulations.
• The Professor, a wheelchair-confined British smartass who the captain describes as not being "half as smart as he thinks he is." So then why the hell did you hire him, you stupid... never mind, I don't care.
• Humvee (Tiny), a big ugly stupid black guy. That's about it. What a wonderful stereotype, I am sure it will be offset by the last crew member:
• 187 (Coolio), the "cargo specialist," who the movie says had an IQ of 187 before going to college and becoming a gigantic stoner. His entire job appears to consist of smoking weed, talking about smoking weed, or talking about how to find more weed that he could then smoke. He doesn't even play the classic "stoner genius" archetype either; he's just a moron.

The Mother III docks with the Demeter and the crew makes Mina earn her non-pay by going aboard the old ship and making sure there are no monsters aboard that will horribly kill her. After wandering around for a while, she starts seeing shadows moving in distant corridors and hearing strange noises. Faced with this danger she pulls the old trick of walking down murky passages backwards, just like people do in real life. Soon she bumps into a big scary black man, just like in real life. However, it turns out that the man is simply Humvee, and he doesn't want to kill her, just sexually assault her. "Once you go black you'll never go back," he says. She declines, unbelievably.

Soon the entire crew is on board the ship and they quickly find the "Central Control Unit" which appears to be in the middle of a grade school boiler room. It seems that 1,000 years in the future science has yet to cure paralysis or even invent some sort of Professor-X-ish hoverchair, because The Professor has to be carried down a flight of stairs to get there. The Professor starts hacking away on a terminal, which displays a Soviet-era hammer and sickle logo for no reason that is ever explained. If the cargo ship had been piloted by a crew from a reformed USSR future-state, that actually might explain why... no. Actually that wouldn't make the movie any less ridiculous, sorry.

While The Professor starts working on powering back up the ship and Mina the intern stands around whining how they are all going to die, the others start wandering around the ship and eventually find their way into the bridge, where they find a desiccated corpse sitting in a command chair. Positive that the dead body's pockets are stuffed full of chronic, 187 dives for it. "Don't touch it!" yell the others, and 187 pouts. Humvee asks why the corpse is holding a plus sign, and Van Helsing points out it's a crucifix, and that the corpse must have wanted to feel closer to God. "Hey, who's God?" asks Aurora. "Nobody," shrugs Van Helsing. Damn Hollywood liberals.

Later the two black men are told to go on patrol and as they wander around the ship Coolio, I mean 187, continues talking about nothing but drugs. "These ships used to smuggle dope before it was legal," he says. "Maybe we can find some good shit." Even cheap, legal drugs are not enough to fuel 187's massive habit, and when they stumble upon a room full of coffins, he does the most rational thing his drug-addled brain can think of: he finds a crowbar and begins ripping open the coffins, convinced that they are crammed chock full of sweet, sweet weed. Sadly, the coffins have nothing so fancy, as they all appear to be full of garden-variety sand. In his frenzy, 187 manages to cut his hand on a shard of wood, and when some drops of blood fall into a pile of sand, the camera zooms in and the music stings ominously, which of course means that he has unleashed some terrible curse or other.

Meanwhile, the white detachment has found a room with personal logs, where they learn the awful truth: before the entire crew was killed, the Demeter had last gone to "Transylvania Station" in the "Carpathian Galaxy." I am sure you can tell where this is going, and next thing you know, Coolio has somehow turned into a vampire and he's threatening the rest of the crew with his overdramatic hisses and posturing, baring his plastic vampire teeth and promising to masturbate all over them. In other words, the basic vampire kind of stuff, except for the masturbation, which was apparently Coolio's contribution to the vampire mythos.

It only goes downhill from here. Coolio is of course supernaturally strong, and runs around the ship, sometimes biting people and sometimes running away for no good reason. However, he's not the only vampire aboard the ship: as the rest of the crew is fanning out searching for him, because of course if he's unstoppable then the best thing to do is to make sure and face him one by one, Aurora instead runs into Dracula, who is literally just some random white guy in a bad Halloween cape, complete with slicked-back hair and white face makeup. Actually, he's not really Dracula, and is instead named "Count Orlock" or something. Despite the fact that the movie is named "Dracula 3000," and it features a completely generic vampire in a situation which obviously has no basis on reality or common sense anyway, the movie makers decided to not actually call him Dracula, meaning that the title makes zero sense and the movie is ever so slightly more retarded. Count Orlock comments that Aurora is the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, which means he must not get out much.