Worse than you remember

Rating: 1/10 (8 August 2014)

I saw this atrocious version of "Dracula" when it was first released in 1992. I tried to forget about it immediately, but twenty-two years later, I found a used DVD of it at a thrift store (cost: fifty cents) and attempted to try a second time to understand why so many people thought this was the "best Dracula ever!!!" (see dozens of rapturous ten star reviews here on IMDb) In truth, this movie is still atrocious.
So. It has been thoroughly established that the title is erroneous. Oh, there's about 25% of Bram Stoker in this pile of vampire guano, but the rest is Coppola's psychedelic interpretation. Coppola seemed determined to make a mom-porn sexy version of the famous novel, so much so that it's a mystery why he didn't cast Fabio in the title role instead of the scenery-chewing Gary Oldman. The screenwriter must have moonlighted for Harlequin Romance novels. For the reported forty million dollars the film cost to make, it looks cheap and shoddy. Painfully obvious models are used for the Westenra estate, the Carfax Abbey sets look borrowed from TV's "Dark Shadows", and let's try to forget again about the model train chugging into Transylvania. The entire exercise feels claustrophobic. Oh yeah, the not so special effects need a mention here as well. Coppola's smug telling of the story includes the "blue flames", seen here as coruscating rings of fire that look like superimposed images from the top of someone's gas range. No explanation for this is given, but in the novel, the coachman (who is Dracula) stops the coach to follow the flames, telling Harker that the blue fire indicates buried treasure. Coppola probably sat back, lit a cigar and felt really literary about including this small bit from the novel, while completely screwing up pretty much everything else.
The much-touted makeup and costumes are so over-the-top and ridiculous it's amazing the actors wore them without laughing. Of special note is the whatever the hell dress Sadie Frost has to wear, the white lace thing with an Elizabethan neck ruff that needs it's own zip code. Miss Frost looks like her head has been detached and placed on a really large doily. Dracula's muscle-system striated armor is plastic, and it shows. Kudos to whoever convinced Coppola that Dracula wandered around his castle in a hostess gown and wore his hair in double-hump albino beehives. The Prince of Darkness is now the Queen of Transylvania. Even Liberace would have had trouble managing this look. You're in trouble when the most remembered thing about your movie is a very bad wig. Etc.
The actors are pretty much embarrassing, only a few escape unscathed. Oldman overplays, Ryder has the appeal of wet cheesecloth, Frost seems to think she's in a soft-core cable porn epic, Waits should have turned this down, Sir Anthony must have need the check, and then there's like, whoa!, Keanu. Wonder if he took this off his resume, if not, he should.
In review, this trashy version of one of the world's great Gothic tales is worse than you remember. It's not faithful enough to the source material, it's not campy enough to be a cult movie, and it's full of shoplifted touches from other, better vampire films. One of these larcenous bits is Dracula's independently moving shadow. While this does not appear in the novel, it was used first in Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu", especially the "long distance" shadow that attends Lucy's party. In 1932, Carl Dreyer used the independent shadow in his "Vampyr" to portray the power the vampire had over it's victims.
I don't think I'll be watching this in 2036, because I gave the DVD back to the thrift store with some old clothes. Hopefully they'll be able to make another fifty cents off it.