Dracula II: Ascension 2003

The film opens with the priest, Father Uffizi, portrayed by Jason Scott Lee, on a relentless close pursuit of a pair of twin female vampires. He manages to kill them, but not before one of the sisters bites him, seeding a vampiric infection that he fights with stubborn resolve. As dawn breaks, his exposure to sunlight temporarily halts the infection, setting the stage for a precarious balance between faith, duty, and darkness.

Elizabeth Blaine, a medical student working at the New Orleans morgue, receives Dracula’s corpse from her friend and co-worker Luke, Jason London, after the events of the previous film. Elizabeth examines the figure and accidentally pricks her finger on a fang, sparking a tense debate with Luke about what to do next. Elizabeth also reaches out to her husband Lowell, a professor at her college who is plagued by a degenerative illness, and the two weigh the possibility that the body could be a vampire. A curious invitation arrives in the mail from a wealthy investor who wants to fund research into the mysterious corpse, all while Dracula remains an unsettling, elusive presence. In the morgue, Father Uffizi arrives to grant Dracula absolution after the Church reveals Dracula to be Judas Iscariot, adding a chilling religious layer to the unfolding crisis. The group of researchers—Elizabeth, Luke, and Lowell—decide to move the body to Lowell’s secluded family home to conduct a controlled experiment.

Lowell enlists two fellow students, Kenny and Tanya, to assist with the research. The plan is methodical: submerge the body in a bathtub full of blood and watch for any sign of life. After a period with no obvious results, Dracula suddenly emerges in a frenzy. The students struggle to hold him down, but Tanya is dragged into the tub and tragically pulled to her death as she falls out of reach. The supposed investor, Eric, arrives and manages to restrain the vampire with a modified light gun, giving the team renewed hope. Tanya’s death, however, unsettles several members of the group, yet they press on, burying her body and continuing the experiment.

The next morning, two police officers arrive in response to a call about odd noises from the night before. One officer discovers Father Uffizi and, noticing the blood from the previous night, attempts to arrest him. Tanya, now revealed to be turned, kills one officer and pursues Uffizi. He subdues her and exposes her to sunlight, ending her reign of terror. Uffizi later goes to a local church, where he flagellates himself with the sunlight to keep his vampiric urges at bay.

With the body now moved to an abandoned pool, the team chains it up and subdues it with ultraviolet light. As they study the vampire, Luke grows increasingly doubtful that this restraint will hold indefinitely and begins to surround the creature with folkloric wards. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s infection deepens, and she becomes more entangled with Dracula, drawn to him by a troubling mix of fear, power, and temptation. Kenny, driven by greed, injects himself with Dracula’s blood and becomes a vampire, joining Eric in a new, dangerous feeding frenzy. The others return to Lowell, who has been lured back to the pool and is found injured and bleeding, apparently swayed by Dracula’s manipulations. In a moment of desperation, Elizabeth again takes blood from Dracula and injects him, hoping to heal him.

Kenny continues his dark awakening by killing a woman, raising the stakes for everyone involved. Uffizi arrives just in time to decapitate Kenny, warning Eric that the body and its blood will no longer be easily controlled. The injection seemingly works, and Lowell regains the ability to walk, but the ruse is about to unravel. Returning to Dracula, Lowell reveals there was no real investor; he and Eric exploited Elizabeth and the others to profit from an immortality serum. Elizabeth hurls holy water at Lowell in anger, and he flees in pain as Uffizi confronts him. Uffizi then encounters Dracula, who has broken free of his restraints and bites Eric’s face off, turning Eric into a grotesque, faceless vampire who attacks the group until Luke’s holy water finally kills him.

In a desperate bid to save Elizabeth, Uffizi urges her to walk into the sunlight and burn away the vampirism that threatens to consume her. Luke tries to shepherd Elizabeth outside, but she resists and vanishes, having already turned into a more dangerous creature. Uffizi catches up with Dracula, who taunts him with insinuations about Christ’s betrayal and the idea that he might have been involved in turning Christ into a vampire. The two engage in a brutal confrontation, and the priest manages to subdue Dracula long enough to begin a rite of absolution. But just before Uffizi can finish, Elizabeth appears and wounds the priest, choosing to flee with Dracula. Dracula, in a fleeting mercy, spares Uffizi, knowing that the hunt will continue.

This expanded, character-driven conflict blends religious symbolism with a grim obsession over immortality, pitting faith, science, and primal hunger against a nightmarish force that refuses to stay buried. The film cycles between antiseptic laboratory settings and fog-drenched streets, balancing investigative discovery with the tragedy of lives caught in the crossfire of ambition, devotion, and the ancient hunger that stalks them all.