Dracula II: Ascension
| Dracula II: Ascension | |
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DVD cover
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| Directed by | Patrick Lussier |
| Produced by | W.K. Border Joel Soisson |
| Written by | Joel Soisson Patrick Lussier |
| Starring |
Jason Scott Lee Jason London Craig Sheffer Stephen Billington Diane Neal John Light Brande Roderick Khary Payton Roy Scheider |
| Music by | Kevin Kliesch Marco Beltrami (themes) |
| Cinematography | Douglas Milsome |
| Edited by | Lisa Romaniw |
| Distributed by | Dimension Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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81 minutes |
| Country | United States Romania |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,200,000 (estimated) |
Dracula II: Ascension is a 2003 direct-to-video American-Romanian horror film, directed by Patrick Lussier. It stars Jason Scott Lee, Stephen Billington and Diane Neal. Filmed entirely in Romania by Castel Film Studios, the film is the sequel to Dracula 2000. It was released direct-to-video on June 7, 2003. The film marks one of the very few cinematic portrayals of certain aspects of vampire lore, such as a vampire's compulsive need to count mustard seeds and untie knots.
The film was followed by a sequel, Dracula III: Legacy (2005).
The film focuses on a small group of overzealous scientists who hope to use Dracula's desiccated - but still alive - body to discover the secret of immortality. Elizabeth Blaine, working at the New Orleans morgue, receives Dracula's 'corpse' from her friend and co-worker Luke following the events of Dracula 2000. (This is a departure from the epilogue of the first film, in which Mary Van Helsing explains in a voiceover that she had returned Dracula to London and assumed her father's duties as Dracula's keeper).
Elizabeth examines the body and pricks her finger on a fang in what is supposed to be a human mouth. This leads her to alert her boyfriend Lowell, who is suffering from an ultimately fatal degenerative sickness. Lowell claims a wealthy investor wants to fund their research into the mysterious corpse (assuming the explanation for its condition is natural rather than having anything to do with the supernatural). They spirit the body away.
On their heels is Father Uffizi, seemingly the Vatican's official vampire hunter. He has been given the task of not only killing Dracula, but granting him absolution (the Church realizes that Dracula is in fact Judas Iscariot). This will allow the vampire to rest in peace. What the Cardinal giving Uffizi this task may or may not know is that the priest was scratched by a vampire fang in a previous hunt. Each day he exposes himself to the sun, burning out the vampiric infection while he screams in pain.
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Wikipedia