DRACULA: A man who dresses like a bat.

PENGUIN: Oh, sure - the Batman may look the look, but he has none of your mojo.

DRACULA: I'm nonetheless intrigued. My legacy has been quite influential.

We start off with one of the old reliable concepts of the Batman mythos: an escape from Arkham Asylum. (I swear, after all the Batman comics I've read over the years, I sometimes think the Arkham staff just puts revolving doors on everybody's cells and then uses the "honor system" in an effort to keep the inmates where they belong. Joker alone has broken out of the place more times than I can count.)

At any rate, the Penguin and the Joker both end up successfully exiting the Asylum this time. They are competing for some stolen treasure they know is hidden in a tomb in a Gotham cemetery. Naturally, Penguin ends up cracking open the wrong coffin, one in which Dracula has apparently been confined as a "dead" skeleton for the past century or so. (Don't ask me why his coffin ended up in Gotham! I don't think anyone knows! Even Dracula, upon awakening, initially assumes he's still in Transylvania and marvels at how his homeland has changed during his long rest!)

Dracula uses his vampiric hypnotism to dominate the Penguin as a mortal servant for most of the movie. The Joker, on the other hand, gets transformed into a vampire. That is to say, a pasty-faced, bloodthirsty, hyperactive lunatic with a nasty sense of humor . . . er, come to think of it, except for his growing some fangs, the change was scarcely noticeable!

If this movie were rated PG-13, I wouldn't bother to mention this next part. But since it's supposed to be suitable for family viewing, set in the same world as the latest Batman Saturday morning cartoon series that's supposedly aimed at kids as the target audience, I figure I'd better assure you of something: Batman eventually finds a treatment that can cure Dracula's infected victims so that not only do they lose their recently acquired vampiric characteristics but they also lose their memories of anything that happened while they were under Dracula's spell, thereby saving them the trouble of spending huge amounts of time in psychotherapy.

And it seems that Dracula was trying to build up an army of followers as quickly and quietly as possible, ergo everyone whom he bit or whom his victims subsequently bit got turned into a vampire and joined his pack, rather than just being left lying in a dark alley as an exsanguinated corpse for the authorities to puzzle over. In other words, by the end of the film I'd concluded that Dracula did not actually murder a single human being when all is said and done, nor cause them to permanently become bloodsucking monsters themselves. Even so, I don't think my mother would have been inclined to let me watch this - with its ominous music and scenes of vampires lunging at people and turning them into more vampires and so forth - when I was, say, six or seven years old. (And she probably would have been right!)

Allowing for the lack of real fatalities, however, I thought the producers did a tolerably good job of making Dracula look and sound approximately the way I expected him to. He certainly had the egotism down pat!

The first time Batman meets vampires out on the streets, his punches are useless against them, he is not packing any specialized anti-vampire equipment, and as he realizes what he is up against, he finds himself in the ignominious position of needing to run away. (Nobody explicitly calls it that in dialogue, but believe me, that was what it amounted to! Interesting change of pace from what I normally expect of him, but it was the most sensible course of action under those extreme circumstances.)

"Vicki Vale" plays a role similar to what she got in the 1989 movie - including attracting the attention of the supervillain as well as of the hero - only more subdued. (To clarify one point: The "continuity" of the current TV series, and thus this film, has no connection to the plot of the 1989 movie; for all practical purposes it never happened. Heck, my understanding is that the recent live-action Batman Begins film also represents a "fresh start" or "reboot" - the beginning of a new series in which the events of the previous films never happened and never will.)

At any rate, this version of Vicki is obviously attracted to Bruce, and he takes her on what might be called dates once or twice, but it's perfectly clear to us suspicious grown-ups that they don't end up in bed together as they did in 1989's Batman when they were played by Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger. For the solace of comic book purists, this version of feisty reporter Vicki Vale is a redhead, as she has always been in the comic books. At the end of the movie, Vicki apparently still doesn't know - or even suspect - that the elusive celebrity Bruce Wayne is the same person as the weirdo who dresses up like a flying rodent on a regular basis.

Alfred Pennyworth, the British butler who basically raised "Master Bruce" for several years and loyally but critically supports his crimefighting endeavors now that he's an adult, continues to get some good lines. One of them was good enough that I decided to swipe it for the title of my review - Alfred's reaction when Bruce has just returned home after his first nasty encounter with the vampires he never really believed in before.

On a later occasion, Alfred is once again hoping that Bruce will someday settle down and start raising a bunch of little Waynes to carry on the family tradition. They are watching Vicki Vale on television one evening, she having arrived at the scene of a recent "abduction" (actually a vampiric attack, which Bruce and Alfred realize but she doesn't) and Alfred says approvingly, "Fancy that. Two night owls on the same case. You are meant for each other!"

A moment later, we learn that an eyewitness claims he saw a huge shadow of a bat sweeping past at the time of the abduction. Vicki Vale faces the camera and says, "As such, Gotham PD has concluded that the perpetrator behind these bizarre abductions is none other than . . . the Batman."

Alfred Pennyworth, standing beside Bruce as they watch this on TV, is caught completely off guard by that conclusion and spits out the tea he had been sipping. He admits, "Well, this could put a kink in the relationship."

Of course, it was actually Dracula in his own elaborate cape that, while not identical to Batman's cape, can give a similar effect in the dark as he jumps through the air.

(Note: This is the sort of trust and affection that self-sacrificing, idealistic superheroes frequently encounter from their supposedly grateful public! You fight and bleed in the defense of innocent civilians on a hundred different occasions, and people say, "Maybe his heart is in the right place - but he's so mysterious, it's hard to be sure." Then - just once - let someone who resembles you commit a visible crime, and everybody says, "Ah ha! His hundred previous acts of heroism were just a false front! I always knew there was something fishy about him!" As opposed to taking a minute to consider that there is no law of nature that makes it utterly impossible for a crook to dress up in something that resembles your distinctive costume . . . many's the time I've seen similar things happen to Spider-Man over the years.)

As a result of this highly shaky conclusion on the part of the police department, we get a scene that really bothers me. As Batman is out on the job later, someone spots him and calls it into the police, and they dispatch several SWAT teams. The first Batman knows of this is when dozens of red dots (from laser sights) are suddenly speckling his costume. Batman jumps aside just as the SWAT guys open fire with bursts from their weapons. I blinked. I didn't hear them call out a warning for him to stop and submit to arrest. In fact, I didn't hear them say a single word before the sweet sound of automatic weapons fire began to fill the air. Why the deadly force so quickly? I'm reasonably certain it's not a major felony to suddenly jump to one side when you discover that dozens of laser sighting dots (from what might or might not be police weapons) are targeting you in the dark, but that jump was the only provocation Batman gave them. He wasn't brandishing any weapon of his own, nor threatening a hostage, nor indulging in any other blatantly violent and criminal act that would force the issue. So much for civil rights - aren't those Gotham SWAT guys getting just a tad trigger-happy here?

(Let's face it: All they have to go on is that a single eyewitness previously stated he saw "the shadow of a huge bat" at the time of an abduction. If he had stated he saw a woman with red hair skulking around the scene of the crime, would the Gotham SWAT guys have started shooting, without warning, every unarmed red-headed woman they subsequently encountered out on the streets after dark, just to be on the safe side?)

The sad thing is that just one extra line of dialogue could have made this scene more acceptable - as is, it could conceivably give small children the impression that if the police ever mistakenly decide you are a bad guy, they will probably shoot you full of holes the next time they see you, without giving you a single warning, and certainly without letting you have anything remotely resembling a fair chance to tell your side of the story.

I looked through the various "extras" on the DVD and found nothing particularly profound. The most memorable feature (at least, to my eyes) was the bit that talks about Science versus Superstition regarding the legends of vampirism.

Narrated by the Batman voice, this section tells us various things of interest, such as how porphyria and rabies can each have effects which make human sufferers seem somewhat vampiric. The false note comes at the very end when the Batman voiceover says something to the effect that now that he has distinguished the facts from the superstitions, he has the tools he needs to fight Dracula. So, instead of this being an alternate take on vampirism, set in the real world and not the world in which the main story occurs, we are supposed to somehow believe that what we have just seen and heard for a few minutes represents a look at some background research Batman did "between the scenes" of the story, in preparation for his final showdown with the master vampire.

The only problem is that this doesn't make any sense in that context. Everything we were told in this segment - until that final speech trying to "tie it in" to the plot of the movie - was based on real-world science and meant to explain the phenomena that have sometimes inspired tales of vampirism. The data about rabies, for instance, is interesting - but totally irrelevant to Batman's fictional problem of needing to fight an honest-to-goodness vampire. If Batman were trying to fight a mad scientist who was injecting people with rabies in order to create the false appearance of an outbreak of vampirism in Gotham City, then brushing up on what modern science knows about rabies would have been an excellent use of his time.

Actors: Rino Romano voices Batman; Tara Strong voices Vicki Vale; Alastair Duncan voices Alfred; Peter Stormare voices Dracula. I thought all of them did their jobs well - my suspension of disbelief stayed in good shape, at any rate, as opposed to my wincing and thinking, "Good grief, who in his right mind would believe that was Count Dracula speaking just now?"

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12