“Transylmania” is a jaw-droppingly unfunny movie – unfocused, strained, artificial, and so desperate for a laugh it tries to be all things to all audiences. It’s at once a horror spoof, a teen sex comedy, a stoner gag fest, a date movie, a gross-out spectacle, a science fiction romp, and a frantic farce of mistaken identity. It plays into the “mania” part of the title, which may in fact be the only thing about this movie that works. I take that back; there is one scene that got a chuckle out of me. A coachman has to deliver a shipment of coffins to a castle, and the vampires in each coffin whine, “Are we there yet?” It might have been funnier if the coachman had been given a clever comeback, maybe something like, “How many more centuries will it take for you to learn patience?”

But rather than try for something subtler, this movie goes for routine, hopelessly obvious jokes, and this definitely includes a duo of flatulent horses that let loose every time someone speaks the name of a Romanian school. (Is this some kind of pathetic reference to “Young Frankenstein” and the horses that whinnied at the sound of the name Frau Blücher?) And let’s not forget the scene in which two teens repeatedly vomit into steel buckets, not just because limbs are being sewn onto a corpse, but also because they’re simultaneously sickened by the sight of each other vomiting. Any actor – however unknown, however untalented, however new they are in show business – should never, ever have to subject themselves to this. It can’t be doing them any good, but more to the point, it’s just plain painful to watch.

The plot is so disjointed and uneven that I’m really not sure which one we’re supposed to follow. A group of American college students travel to Romania for a semester abroad. Once at their new school, which was once a castle, they find themselves pitted against an ancient vampire, a music box that holds the soul of the vampire’s lover, a vampire hunter who takes her job a little too seriously, a conniving dwarf dean, his hunchbacked daughter, and a sinister plot to find her a new body.

For added fun, the ancient vampire, Radu, and the sex-starved American transfer student, Rusty, are both played by the same actor (Oren Skoog). This means that there will be numerous scenes where one character is thought to be the other, bringing about chaos. The soul of Radu’s lover will occasionally take control of the body of Lynne (Jennifer Lyons), who eventually comes to believe her personality shifts are the work of extraterrestrial forces. Here enters her boyfriend, Newmar (Tony Denman), who sees her throwing herself at both Rusty and Radu and determines that it’s all part of a plot to steal her away. Meanwhile, the potheaded duo of Wang and Pete (Paul H. Kim and Patrick Cavanaugh) go off in search of Romania’s hottest parties before getting involved with identical twins Lia and Danni (Natalie and Nicole Garza).

So we basically have too many characters in a story with too many subplots mired by too many gags that go for the lowest common denominator. This isn’t a movie – it’s a free-for-all. This goes double for the final major scene, where everyone seems to be caught up in some kind of duel, real and imagined.

This is the third film in the “National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze” series, the first of which had a limited release back in 2003 and made $60,000 in domestic box office. I would be very surprised (and more than a little annoyed) if a similar fate didn’t befall “Transylmania,” a film that fails at being funny on virtually every level. I wish I could say it had the ambition to be funny, but since it goes all over the place in terms of plot and style, it clearly did not; there’s no conceivable way we can laugh at narrowly defined physical gags one minute and broad verbal one liners the next. There’s nothing about either that suggests they could ever work together in the same movie. And what’s the deal with all the jokes about sex and marijuana? Honestly, is there nothing else teenagers will laugh at these days?

What were directors David and Scott Hillenbrand thinking? What were writers Patrick Casey and “Worm” Miller thinking? What were the actors thinking? How could anyone let themselves fall into disaster zones like this? Then again, maybe the blame doesn’t lie entirely with the filmmakers; they wouldn’t have made it, after all, if there wasn’t an audience out there demanding it. So then it begs the question of why such audiences exist. How could anyone find this stuff even remotely entertaining? “Transylmania” is a bad movie, and I don’t mean bad in that campy, fun way where friends can spend a Saturday night together; it’s just bad, about as bad as bad can get. If you’re even thinking of going to see this movie, do yourself a tremendous favor and keep it a secret. If you tell anyone, I suspect you may be laughed at for a very long time.

- Chris Pandolfi

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