I’ve just sat through the interminable Hollywood crap-pic Dracula Untold – if only it had been untold, I’d be a lot less cranky right now. Or at least if someone had given the scriptwriters a good slap upside the head before they filled the script with a load of bollocks that was apparently cribbed directly from daytime soap opera.

Yes, I thought some of the casting was good, and it’s always a treat to see all those British actors popping up the way they do. And yes, the special effects were effective and, well, special.

But the script was woeful. All that romantic-hubby-and-loving-playful-father tosh was just extremely irritating, as if Vlad Dracul were an average character in a modern sitcom simply dressed up in leather trews and a muscle shirt.

As Agatha Runcible*  would say, it was too, too terribly sick-making.

Add to that the sheer stupidity of the man wasting 2 of his (supposedly) 3 nights in making melodramatic speeches when he should have been annihilating the foe, and you get one very annoying film indeed.

In short: give this a miss, unless you take some mind-altering pharmaceuticals beforehand. And if you’re doing that anyway, then why waste your hallucinations on this bollocks?

* From Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Vile Bodies”, adapted for the screen by Stephen Fry as Bright Young Things, in case you care. Might one day write about the book or the film or both, if I run out of other things to wiffle about.

** Thanks to Horrible Histories for the indelible image of Vlad the Impala that is now stuck in my head forever – if you’ve never watched HH, then get thee hence without delay.