Forgetting it’s a motion picture that can show as well as tell, “Dracula” becomes burdened with enough empty-calorie chitchat to rival a full week’s worth of “The View.”

Now it just feels less like enjoying a popcorn B-movie in a theater and more like watching the nightly news on a panic room monitor.

No normal person looks at cover art featuring Mickey Rourke in an eyepatch and thinks, “This ought to be an epic war movie on par with ‘Saving Private Ryan’.”

Even when the movie follows expected conventions, it does so creatively, and always with an eye for maximum cinematic suspense.

It’s all a whole lot of basic blah blah blah, unsurprisingly resulting in a movie that’s just as blah as everything in it.

“Amityville Uprising” plays like ‘A Day in the Life’ of an average neighborhood police station, with all of the dull drama that entails.

When it comes to a blind person battling a trio of thieves trying to rob an isolated house, “See for Me” leaps high above “Don’t Breathe.”

The more of these DIY Amityville junkers I sit through, the more they violently rub sandpaper all over my lifelong love of horror.

“Spiral” appears to instead come “From the Book of Dick Wolf,” as it plays like a pedestrian police procedural infrequently peppered with gobs of gore.

“Antlers” isn’t at all equipped to sustain a spot in pop culture’s consciousness for longer than it takes the end credits to finish scrolling.

“Resident Evil” might be under new management, but “Monster Hunter” delivers familiar flavors from the chef’s signature menu.

Benson and Moorhead have been building a uniquely identifiable brand of eeriness that could be called “cosmic horror for the new millennium.”

If I didn’t know differently, I’d have guessed it was the other way around, and that “Scare Me” had been adapted from a live theater show.

Ironically, having nothing better to do is how people ended up making this movie in the first place.

If “Aliens” is letter A, and a $900 DIY-er shot on a cellphone in a cardboard tube passing for a tunnel is letter Z, then “Death Valley” is somewhere around P.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” turns into a real ripper exploding with cool creatures, hilarious laughs, and a Hallmark holiday movie’s worth of heart that’s unexpectedly charming.

Not only is it one of the best thrillers of the year, “The Advent Calendar” might have a prime place on the list of perennial holiday horror hits to revisit every December too.

“Black Friday” settles for being a hollow horror-comedy that just acts slightly silly instead of actually loading up on sharp jokes and good gags.

Set your standards to meet the movie’s lowered level and you might find its occasional kookiness to be intermittently captivating.

When I exited at the other end of a finely tuned yet relatively ordinary haunter, I found myself asking, “That’s all?”