espite an ominous opening title sequence, featuring ghastly gothic imagery and striking music by Hummie Mann, the mood quickly turns from severe to silly, as solicitor Thomas Renfield (Peter MacNicol) arrives by carriage to Transylvania in 1893. With slapstick sequences and a pratfall entrance, he makes it as far as a small village that lies on the outskirts of a forbidden castle, where Count Dracula (Leslie Nielsen) resides. And Dracula is rumored to be a very bad man. “Surely that’s just superstition.”

Bleak and cobwebbed, the monstrous estate is both crumbling and inescapable – and littered in so much bat guano that Dracula himself suffers a hilarious tumble down the stairs as he greets the unsuspecting lawyer, whose business involves the purchase of property back in England. Once Renfield is thoroughly entranced, the duo charter a ship (the Demeter) to transport the Count’s coffin to his new home, opposite a sanitarium run by the renowned Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman), where the Count will begin his reign of bloodsucking terror. “I’m very confident there’s no danger here whatsoever.”

From the slip in feces, to the Count’s towering hairdo, to Renfield’s cut finger – which releases a geyser of blood – the initial moments are outright hysterical in their ridiculousness. This property in particular is easy to parody, as so many of the components are well-known; there’s not a lot to establish that isn’t already common knowledge. The bat transformations (here, the decision to attach Nielsen’s head to a bat body, like something from “The Fly” [1958] is hilarious); Renfield’s obsession with insects; the pale vampire bride; and the destruction of Jonathan Harker’s (Steven Weber) life, alongside his fiancee Mina Seward (Amy Yasbeck), are rather straightforward, predictable inclusions, though tinged with giddiness. And the recruitment of medical genius Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Mel Brooks) is similarly anticipated. “We have entered the realm of the supernatural.”

Some sketches carry on too long, as is customary in Brooks’ spoofs, dragging modest ideas out until they’re no longer effective. The procession of the story is also intermittently tedious, as it mostly sticks to expected routines. But the pacing is swift, the expeditiousness of subsequent gags frequent, and the over-the-top nature of performances (including poking fun at excessive accents) routinely amusing. A few fresh elements do arise, such as daymares for Dracula, Seward’s overprescription of enemas, and Van Helsing’s gynecological side-gig. The edginess of a handful of sexual jokes also benefits from a steadily diminishing censorship system. Though it brims with recognizable Brooks film regulars and his signature, lively genre send-ups, his schtick runs a bit dry with this latest production. It’s still entertaining to see how he satirizes the classic tale, but the last act fails to present enough laugh-out-loud funny moments to make this one of the more stand-out entries in his collection of comedies.

– Mike Massie