Still me wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2020 2:36 am
Dracula a Go-Go
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
Not quite
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, tho’ it has some surface-level fidelity most adaptations don’t bother with. The style, tone, and acting are so overblown the movie becomes ludicrous. An overripe romance. Funny to think that a movie with a cast, budget, and director of this calibre is outdone at its own game by something like
The Lost Boys. Never thought I’d find myself giving the nod to Joel Schumacher over Francis Ford Coppola, but here we are.
Dracula (John Badham, 1979)
A handsome production. Langella underplays his performance, but gives his Count a sexual magnetism mainly communicated by a penetrating stare. He plays off a preternatural stillness with restless eyes. Certainly better than Coppola’s hysterical version. If there is a weakness here, it lies in the source material. The best part of any Dracula adaptation is also the most successful part of the book: the gothic opening in Dracula’s castle. Things inevitably drop off when we move to the various drawing rooms and dinner tables that occupy the rest of the story. You see why it translated so well to the theatre: the bulk of the story observes the restrictions of the stage. But what makes the story work so well under the proscenium also works against it when put to film: the action is constrained and talky, the monster content to prey quietly on a pair of upper-class maidens. Badham does his best to open things up, with plenty of chilly exteriors, some gothic set design, and a beautiful, abstract representation of a blood drinking/seduction. And yet the majority of the film remains confined to the drawing room where people talk and exchange glances. This isn’t helped by the decision to excise all scenes set in Dracula’s castle, beginning instead on the Demeter moments before it runs aground and lets Dracula loose in Britain (a decision straight out of the Hamilton Deane play it’s adapting). However handsome the production and assured the acting, there’s no hiding that the movie has confined itself to adapting the least interesting part of Stoker’s novel.
Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)
Aging queen Count Dracula travels to Italy to find virgin’s blood because he’s told the Catholic church keeps Italians virginal. Surprise, there are few virgins to be found. Not quite a farce or a satire, though it makes some half-hearted overtures at both. It
is a comedy, though it prefers to get laughs from being trashy and arch rather than through jokes. I found it mostly amateurish. Dracula’s goofy demise was entertaining, though.
Blacula (William Crain, 1972)
African prince Mamuwalde, in Transylvania on a mission to end the slave trade, is turned into a vampire by Dracula and sealed in a coffin for centuries, only to be unleashed in 70s America. Nothing is done with the premise. Despite being centuries out of date, Mamuwalde never so much as bats an eye at his new environment. Contemporary culture washes right over him. It’s a typical vampire story with the now cliched Dracula-seeks-resurrected-lover plot. About on the level of Hammer’s
Dracula A.D., 1972, only without Lee and Cushing to brighten things. William Marshall does make for a commanding Dracula, tho’.
Scream, Blacula, Scream (Bob Kelljan, 1973)
Contra its reputation, the first film wasn’t blaxploitation--it wasn’t exploitation at all, actually. It was an old-fashioned, straight-forward vampire film that happened to star mainly black people. Its sequel on the other hand begins almost immediately with voodoo rituals, so you know what it aspires to be. Mamuwalde is resurrected by the bitter son of a recently dead witch doctor who wants revenge on the congregation for not recognizing him as successor. Blacula bites him right away and off we are on a tepid vampire story. Blacula spends far too much time attending house parties. William Marshall is again a commanding presence. Would that he were given more to do than wander through this creaky film.
Count Dracula (Jess Franco, 1970)
Christopher Lee’s
non-Hammer Dracula film. Lee was making
Taste the Blood of Dracula and
Scars of Dracula for Hammer around the same time and reportedly much preferred what he was doing with Franco. I see the attraction for Lee: the movie hews closely to the book, more closely than any Hammer film, and allows Lee to be more than an imposing but wordless presence. He’s given many of Dracula’s speeches from the book to intone. Indeed, his Dracula is less bestial than the Hammer incarnation, carrying instead a proud, lonely majesty. If I linger on Lee, it’s because he’s the only bright spot in this dreary and boring film. A higher budget and more talent behind the camera might’ve given us something terrific and Lee a Dracula film to rival his first. Instead, here’s one more creaky Euro production to be endured.
Cuadecuc, vampir (Pere Portabella, 1971)
An experimental retelling of Franco’s film, combining black and white footage from the film as well as behind the scenes footage. Works as both a making-of and a narrative in its own right. Strange and worth experiencing.
The Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
At first Lee’s Dracula seems almost colourless, an austere British aristocrat with an upper-class accent who utters clipped pleasantries and commonplaces and who never seems menacing, not overtly (tho’ there’s something to how he clenches his jaw repeatedly and stares whenever Harker turns away). That is, until 15 minutes in, when Lee comes crashing into the room, eyes ablaze, fangs dripping blood, in that glorious close-up that marks my presence on the forum. Tho’ he doesn’t speak another word, his presence dominates the remaining film. To any boy or girl who grew up on Universal Draculas, with the lack of fangs and tasteful fades to black just as the vampire leers in, the boldness and ferocity of Lee’s portrayal coupled with the bright colours was delightful beyond words. And to those of us who’d read and re-read the novel and seen the Lugosi film and Murnau’s
Nosferatu ad nauseum, how thrilling to see Hammer upend our expectations out the gate and reveal Jonathan Harker’s true purpose at the castle. After that, who knew what would happen next! That’s something Hammer could do better than anyone at the time: take the old classics, lead you on for a moment thinking you’d get the same old thing, then rip out the carpet. They weren’t radical, but they knew how to surprise their audience. And they were efficient story tellers, too. Here, every bit of fat is cut out; the movie zips along. Its speed in part helps keep it from falling prey to the drawing room tedium that’s plagued this story since it was published, but otherwise it’s the commanding performance of Peter Cushing that anchors the second act. A stuffy professor in other adaptations, he’s a man of action here, as much at home vaulting railings and barrelling down tables as he is sitting quietly in his library. You are as happy to watch Cushing as you are Lee. The most entertaining Dracula film ever made.
Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary (Guy Maddin, 2002)
Combines the now familiar sexual and racial interpretations of the novel into a more overt fear of miscegenation. Even though silent film pastiches are Madden’s thing, it’s so organic a choice to capture the wordless but music-dominated state of a ballet. Another film that manages to overturn the drawing room tedium of the middle stages of the novel, here by capturing the beauty and energy of ballet with a ceaseless filmic energy. A rich and textured film. It also does two unique things: despite being both intensely cinematic
and theatrical, it also finds a way to work in the epistolary theme of Stoker’s novel, and this theme allows it to tell Harker’s story at castle Dracula not at the beginning, but 40 minutes in, just after the dispatching of the vampire Lucy. So we’re given the pleasure of the best scenes of the novel at precisely a point structurally where a pause is most effective. One of the very best Dracula films ever made. It’s available to watch legally and for free on youtube. Please give it a watch.
Count Dracula (Philip Saville, 1977)
A faithful BBC adaptation. Perhaps fearing slavishness, the film punctuates things with ill-considered, hokey stylizations: negative stock, overlays, freeze frames, shock shots of fire and red eyes, earlier dialogue echoing around the sound track. It’s quite 70s television. Hammer and Badham had Dracula crawling down the castle walls on his fingers, like a cat or a spider. Saville has him flopping down the walls like a bat. Flump, pause, flump, pause. I get the logic, but did no one actually
see what they were getting? This couples poorly with its decision to make Dracula’s bat form an adorable flying fox. It’s far from the only adaptation with this particular misstep, and I do see the practical necessity, but, again, did no one actually
see what they were getting? Louis Jourdan plays Dracula as a gothic villain, all politeness and charm on the surface, but taunting and manipulative underneath with a barely masked smirk of superiority. This works especially during Harker’s captivity in the castle, which is like a cat-and-mouse between hero and villain in an old gothic novel. The movie plays up the sex rather grossly: whenever Dracula preys on Lucy, they both moan like it’s a German porno. How often this adaptation strains for effect and fails! The blandness of the rest throws this straining into such relief that you want to laugh. The movie bounces between the staid and the ridiculous. And yet the opening act in Dracula’s castle is rather good, and the carriage ride through the Carpathians is among the best of the adaptations, building a genuine and chilling atmosphere of dread and expectation. The production’s a difficult thing to recommend because so much is merely competent, and what stands out is the missteps. But it does have a strong opening act, so there’s that.
Legacy of Dracula: the Vampire Doll (Michio Yamamoto, 1970)
This one’s very much a western vampire film that happens to take place in the east. The setting is even an old western-style house so the film can better ape the gothic horrors that’d been coming out of Britain and America. It’s structured like a mystery, with a sister and her boyfriend trying to discover why her brother went missing and what secret the family in the big gothic house is hiding. Except we already know the answer from the opening scene: the daughter’s a vampire. The elaborations on this answer are unnecessary and pretty trashy.
Lake of Dracula (Michio Yamamoto, 1971)
From the story, to the colours, to the gothic set design, this one feels more like an old school Hammer film. Only the location shooting violates the sensibility. It’s more visually interesting than its predecessor, too. The lighting is more varied and textured, and the compositions often have more life to them. Japanese Dracula (Jacula?) shows up in this one, arriving in a coffin mysteriously delivered by an ominous driver. The actor plays his Dracula like Lee, but physically more resembles John Carradine (himself a decent Dracula). The film is in large part about the recovering of traumatic memories. Not that this is given much thematic development. It’s mostly there to anchor the narrative and lend the heroine some dramatic heft. A movie for those who like their vampire films with lots of mood and atmosphere and a minimum of blood and sex.
Evil of Dracula (Michio Yamamoto, 1974)
More nudity, more blood, more 70s hair cuts. This one ups the trash quotient and adds a bit of datedness to the mix. The movie is now aping later Hammer: half Gothic classiness, half Euro sleaze. It’s about on par with Hammer’s decent mid-range films from the period, like
Twins of Evil or
Vampire Circus. The trouble with watching these three films in a row is they’re all of a piece. It gets wearisome. I keep comparing them to Hammer because there seems little point comparing them to each other. This one even full on copies a sequence from the previous film.
Count Dracula’s Great Love (Javier Aguirre, 1973)
Legendary Spanish horror icon, Paul Naschy, assays the title role. Thought to’ve been destroyed by van Helsing, Dracula actually survived and has taken on the identity of one Dr. Marlowe, head of a newly opened sanitarium. A carriage loses its wheel and five travelers (four of whom are wearing impossibly plunging necklines) have to spend the week with Dracula. Naschy’s often called the Spanish Lon Chaney, but he’s more like Chaney Jr.: appropriate in his trademark werewolf character, but unsuited to the other flagship monsters he found himself playing. Just physically he’s inappropriate for Dracula: short, squat, and pudgy, with a soft, round face and large almond eyes. He’d make a better Renfield, but then there’s no Renfield in the movie. There’s barely a Dracula. I mean, he has tender, gauze-filtered sex with women, talks of regretting casual sex because love is “more than a game”, and gets in two different fist fights with vampire underlings that sees him thrown into walls, knocked down by punches, and choked unconscious with a fire poker. He even sheds a tear at one point. There’s something about the love of a pure woman making him take on his mortal form again, but it’s not terribly coherent and comes so long after these bewildering moments that you spend much of the movie watching in confusion as the Prince of Darkness is manhandled by underlings and engages in Eurotrash sex scenes.
Nosferatu (Werner Herzog, 1979)
Suffused with death and decay, with hopeless longing and a despair at existence. No Dracula film has had such an overwhelming texture of death to it. From the mummies, to the rats, to the coffin processions and plague revellers, mortality as a physical, tangible reality surrounds the story. And yet, for all the morbidity, Herzog builds something radiant. The movie proceeds like a dream, flowing trance-like through moments of astonishing natural beauty and gothic splendour. Herzog easily outdoes Rollin at this kind of atmosphere, and does so while still succeeding at a conventional narrative. Herzog even manages to outdo Murnau, whose Romantic imagery, beautiful as it is, cannot compete with Herzog’s eye for the grandeur and madness of nature. Outside the set-pieces, the Murnau plods. Herzog pulls you into a dream. He liberates the film from the drawing-room stultification, using the second act to explore the dissolution of society from the plague, done all through the eyes of Lucy, a character who has never had so much agency, not even in the Murnau. The most beautiful Dracula film ever made.
Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
Lugosi is the ur-Dracula. No other worthy has managed to outdo him for sheer appropriateness. He anchors a flawed movie. One wonders if there was anyone actually directing the thing. Freund’s camerawork is beautiful, its movements so smooth and appropriate that you almost don’t register you’re seeing them from 1931. But the blocking is so bad. The film’s origin as a stage production can’t explain it as the blocking isn’t even terribly good
stage blocking: characters cramped around each other, half the time with their backs to the audience/camera. And then there’s the weird production errors, like light blockers left attached to lamps, as though the camera position were changed at the last minute without anyone bothering to change anything else. Why mention all this? Samuel Johnson had it that “[a]ll censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.” Well, consider the above how much
the movie can spare. For gothic splendour, for iconography, and for having
the Dracula, the movie is unmatched. The battle of wills between Dracula and Van Helsing are electric. Those performances by Sloan and especially Lugosi are why the Spanish version, for all its technical superiority and uncut narrative, will never be the preferable option (really, who can stand Carlos Villarias bug-eyed performance?). The English-language 1931
Dracula remains a terrific version with an immortal performance.
Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
I enjoyed myself more this time than previously. It’s still a bit of a tough sit--I think I liked it more when it was 60 minutes on a sped up VHS--but Murnau has a great eye for visuals. Lucy sitting in the sea-side graveyard is one of cinema’s most beautifully composed shots. And what is there left to say about Schreck’s demon of a vampire? Time hasn’t robbed it of its power, and yet it’s not the best Dracula film, nor the best Murnau film, nor even the best Nosferatu film. Bit of an awkward position.
Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1960)
Follows Cushing’s van Helsing rather than Dracula himself. No complaints from me; Cushing is always a delight, so much so it hardly matters that the lead vampire has no presence, being a weasily wastrel from a rich family, more punchable than frightening. Terence Fisher, always a dependable talent, keeps the story brisk and the visuals classy and atmospheric. He’s underrated as an action director, but his talents in that area are well in display for the climax. A solid Hammer.
Dracula Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher, 1966)
A slower film than the previous two; takes its time building an unsettling gothic atmosphere before unleashing its brightly coloured horrors. An effective film, I’ve always thought. A solid example of Hammer’s craft in its golden era. If not quite as good as the very best of the company, it’s a top shelf example of the mid-rank and always a worthy revisit.
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968)
Dracula, revived by a fortuitous trickle of blood, sets out to avenge himself on the monsignor and his family for having hung a cross on his castle doors. Freddie Francis, a fine cinematographer, makes a decent director. He is especially good when photographing Lee, who has never looked so grand and menacing. Indeed, this contains my favourite Lee Dracula moments outside the original. Francis doesn’t quite have Fischer’s sense of briskness, so while the film never drags, it lacks the propulsion of the first two. The young lead also looks distractingly like Rob Brydon. While the Frankenstein films have the reputation of getting stronger as they went along, and rightly so, the Dracula films are largely thought to’ve gone almost immediately downhill. The final four deserve their low reputation, but this one is a solid vampire film, entertaining, wonderfully gothic, well-acted, with a nice sense for visuals. In no measure does it deserve the dismissal it’s commonly given. Its chief sin, I suppose, is being not so different from what went before.
Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970)
Somewhere around the start of the 70s, Hammer got a strange idea into their heads. They decided to replenish their dwindling audience by replacing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with an actor that skewed younger, and for whatever reason felt the perfect person to replace them was…Ralph Bates. Now, I don’t mean to insult Ralph Bates—I rather like him—but I can’t imagine what anyone saw in him that made them think he could fill either of those shoes, let alone both. Seems at least someone agreed, since, while he was allowed to take over as Frankenstein in the poorly received
Horror of Frankenstein, he was nixed as the new Dracula some time into production. Originally, tasting the blood of Dracula was to turn Bates’ young seeker of dangerous pleasures into the new incarnation of Dracula. The movie would’ve worked better, admittedly, if things had been allowed to go as planned—but then we’d’ve had Bates as Dracula and, really, who wants that? So Lee was brought back, thankfully, as he was by this point one of the few reasons to keep watching the series. When Bates drinks the fatal blood, Lee appears and somewhat confusingly sets out on revenge against the three libertines who’d callously left Bates in extremis when the blood-drinking ceremony had gone badly. There
is a level on which the film doesn’t quite work, admittedly; yet it’s just different enough, and led with a sure enough hand, that the movie comes off nevertheless. Its puncturing of Victorian hypocrisy, while dated even by the end of the Edwardian era, let alone 1970, does lend the revenge story some nice dramatic stakes and an appropriate sense of the perverse.
Dracula (Bill Eagles, 2006)
A more recent BBC production. It goes the opposite way of its predecessor, reimagining the story and adding dollops of vulgar detail. For example, before we’re given even a glimpse of Dracula, Arthur Holmwood learns he had contracted syphilis at birth and is destined to end up a deformed madman like his father. There follows a long, brooding shot where he gazes at a carbuncle and screams to the sky: “Why hast thou forsaken me!”. He’ll be the dour antihero of the thing, clearly. The movie piles complications on the story, involving a Dracula cult and Arthur having funded Dracula’s move to England to guarantee a cure for himself. Van Helsing is a prisoner of the cult, kept in a dirty basement because he “knows too much”. Dracula, Marc Warren here, shows up as a wheezing, decrepit zombie with an aging metalhead’s hairdo. Warren rasps, grunts, and shuffles his way through the Transylvania scenes in a manner supposed to be ancient, I think, but mostly makes Dracula seem in need of a gargle with salt water and a good nap. He drinks Harker’s blood and goes from asthmatic metalhead to sad goth Ramsay Bolton. He’s much shorter than all the other actors, which the movie does little to hide. It’s a performance neither intimidating nor sexy. The least effective Dracula this side of Paul Naschy. Beyond that, the movie’s ugly to look at, with lots of fuzzy CGI and harsh, digital photography not helped by rotten colour grading (most night scenes are in an unvarying washed-out green). Perhaps the worst direct adaptation of the novel.
Dracula (Dan Curtis, 1973)
Advertised on the cover as
Dan Curtis’ Dracula, who google tells me is the guy who did
Dark Shadows, though it was originally titled
Bram Stoker’s Dracula before Coppola decided he wanted that marketing for himself. Coppola also took several of this television film’s conceits, like Dracula being an undead Vlad the Impaler and Lucy his lost love’s doppelganger. This is the kind of film to introduce its bad guy with a severe canted angle. Jack Palance plays Jack Palance playing Dracula. He attempts a Hungarian accent for his first few lines in the movie, rather successfully, and then drops it entirely the very next scene. It reappears here and there, in a word or two, but mostly Palance sticks to over-enunciating his syllables and speaking in a monotone. On paper, you’d see how an actor who specializes in menacing villains would be an ideal choice for Dracula, but Palance is too mannered and peculiar and too much the red blooded American to suit the role. At times he accesses that incredible menace he can convey with only a soft-spoken word or small gesture, and you glimpse something of what the filmmakers envisioned when they hired him. But then he goes back to his facial tics, weird, quivering manner of speaking, and wholly American verbal presence, and you’re back to watching Jack Palance with fangs.
Dracula Untold (Gary Shore, 2014)
What if the prologue for
Bram Stoker’s Dracula were a whole movie? Vlad Tepes, Transylvanian hero and guardian against the Turks, good family man and all around decent lad, finds it necessary to accept the power of the devil to help him in his battles. Less a horror than an epic fantasy. That Dracula can defeat entire Turkish armies singlehanded makes his later death at the hands of a band of society men rather embarrassing. A big, grand adventure like this just makes Stoker’s novel bathetic instead of imbued with grandeur. One of the world’s greatest villains rendered a vulnerable underachiever in the end. Charles Dance plays the ancient Roman vampire that gives Dracula his powers. It made me wish to see him play Dracula himself. I bet he’d be grand.
