A really atmospheric and fun animated direct to video superhero movie.
After the Penguin escapes from Arkham, he is out looking for some treasure that he believes is buried under Gotham City. Instead he finds the one and only Count Dracula who hypnotizes the Penguin into being his servant (having Penguin play the Renfield role in this film). The prince of darkness goes around Gotham turning the citizens into vampires wherever he goes. Batman must put a stop to Dracula's horrifying deeds, but this won't be easy as the count is hunting Batman himself.
What works surprisingly well about this movie are the horror aspects. There are scenes from this film that could have easily come from a horror picture. I felt myself becoming increasingly uneasy as the film went on and the fact that this was done so effectively gives me great respect for this movie. There is a tenseness and real feeling of suspense throughout the whole film and it only grows larger the movie goes on, leading to an especially exciting climax. Yet rather than just a horror film, this movie does feel completely like a Batman story. This is a Batman movie that truly explores the detective side of Batman. Even though he knows who the villain is early on, he still has to discover a way to stop this unseeingly stoppable force and try to find a way to heal those who Dracula has already turned into vampires. Meanwhile this film also explores the difficultly in Bruce Wayne trying to have any semblance of a life outside of Batman. He is dating Vicky Vale and does really care for you, yet his duties as Batman prevent him from actually dedicating himself to her in any way or giving her the time and attention, she deserves. This makes this supernatural based film with a seemingly silly premise (Dracula's tomb is now under Gotham!?) a very human story and actually a pretty good character study. This movie also benefits from some really fun action scenes, especially the wonderful climatic action scene. The background art and use of lighting (in this animated film) are also very good and create a real sense of atmosphere.
This movie does suffer from a lot of dialogue that is simply awkward and not very good. It also doesn't help that most of the humor falls quite flat. I also don't much care for the Joker's design (which just looks weird and kind of ugly) here, though that is a minor problem as the Joker doesn't receive much screen time here.
This movie is a feature length addition to the animated TV series, The Batman (2004-2008), taking place within the same universe, using the same designs, animation style and voices and being made by the same people. The director, Michael Goguen was one of the developers of the series. He also worked as a storyboard artist on Batman the Animated Series (1992-1995) and Batman: Brave and the Bold (2008-2011) as well as on plenty of the feature length animated DC comics movies and even some of the direct to video Scooby-Doo! movies.
Despite its flaws, this is a surprisingly quite good movie and should delight both Batman fans and horror fans.
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