Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Director: Francis Ford Coppola Dracula: Gary Oldman Whatever happened to Francis Ford Coppola? It beggars the imagination that the director who made five masterpieces in ten years (Patton, The Conversation, Godfather I and II, Apocalypse Now) also made this chemical fire of a film. Even the uneven Eighties Coppola was better than this, […]
Tag Archives: thrill of dracula
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) Director: Freddie Francis Dracula: Christopher Lee A peculiar blend of apathy and attention makes this perhaps the most frustrating of the Hammer Draculas. Anthony Hinds (writing as “John Elder”) cares so little about the script that he doesn’t even bother to name Ewan Hooper’s weak Renfielded priest, and […]
The Batman vs. Dracula (2005) Director: Michael Goguen Dracula: Peter Stormare A few truths: Doug Moench’s graphic novel Batman & Dracula: Red Rain is a superior Batman vs. Dracula story. It could not have been made into a children’s animated cartoon. Which (despite a good bit of blood and a shocking – heh – death […]
Nosferatu (1979) Director: Werner Herzog Dracula: Klaus Kinski “For me, genre means an intensive, almost dreamlike stylization on screen, and I feel the vampire genre is one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. There is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions, fear, and of course, mythology.” — Werner Herzog, giving us […]
House of Frankenstein (1944) Director: Erle C. Kenton Dracula: John Carradine “The world I see is far away. Yet very near. A strange and beautiful world … in which one may be dead … and yet alive.” — Rita Hussman (Anne Gwynne), unconsciously giving us the epigraph for the entire Universal horror series John Carradine’s first appearance as Dracula (of at […]
Dracula’s Curse (2002) Director: Roger Young Dracula: Patrick Bergin This production began on Italian TV (shot on video) as Il Bacio di Dracula (The Kiss of Dracula); I watched the Artisan DVD version entitled Dracula’s Curse, which cuts about an hour out of the run time because I just said Artisan. (Some of it shows […]
Dracula (1968) Director: Patrick Dromgoole Dracula: Denholm Elliott Man, if every episode of the Thames TV series Mystery and Imagination mounted this kind of creative response to low budgets and primitive facilities, I’m really bummed that three seasons are lost. But I’m glad this fourth-season episode (90 minutes, divided into three Acts) survived on YouTube. Although it […]
Buffy vs. Dracula (2000) Director: David Solomon Dracula: Rudolf Martin Television being a writer’s medium, it’s probably best if writer Marti Noxon takes the credit and the blame for this, the premiere episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s fifth season. Following series creator Joss Whedon’s idea to use the actual Dracula instead of “some cool vampire […]
Scars of Dracula (1970) Director: Roy Ward Baker Dracula: Christopher Lee Let us resolutely ignore the dead pacing (probably from Anthony Hinds’ screenplay), the insane overlighting that washes out Christopher Lee’s makeup unforgivably, and the damp-even-for-a-Hammer-romantic-male-lead dampness of the “romantic male lead” Simon (Dennis Waterman). Let us ignore the comically ineffective “set fire to the […]
Dracula (1979) Director: John Badham Dracula: Frank Langella Now this is how to get Dracula wrong. John Badham’s feminist (well, feminist-for-1979) deconstruction of the stage play and Stoker’s novel creates a gothic fantasy in which “Lucy Seward” (Kate Nelligan, actually playing Mina) yearns for the liberating touch of Frank Langella’s catlike, genteel Dracula. And if you […]