This Is One Of The Silliest Dracula Films

Rating: 2/10 (6 August 2006)

Before ploughing into what's so very wrong about this film certain points of near brilliance have to be mentioned.
The costume design (though frequently historically inaccurate) is amazing.
There are several sequences (particularly the shadow of The Count menacing Harker) which are so good they really should be lifted and placed in a much better film than this one.
And the score is exceptional.
But everything else needs to tucked away in the sort of concrete bunker that nuclear waste is deposited into.
For a film that has the nerve to call itself Bram Stoker's Dracula, it is less true to that, so film-able but alas yet to be faithfully adapted, novel as many of the films it apparently is trying to distance itself from.
The 'love story' element particularly, is a very wonky add on pinched off and done better in the Jack Palance version.
The accents of Reeves and Ryder are shockingly awful.
The film seems to have been edited to deliberately remove all suspense and narrative flow from the story.
The most cinematic moments of the book (The Demeter Crossing, Lucy's first sighting of the Count, the death of Lucy's mother, Lucy escaping Van Helsing etc as mist, the fight between Reinfield and the Count, the tracking down of the Counts coffins) All lost or skipped over to make way for Mina's trysts with Prince Vlad.
Where's the Golden Krone segment?
And since when has Whitby been a suburb of London?
Lucy herself is turned from being the pretty, but silly thing of the novel (who becomes shockingly sensual as a vampire) into a naughty little strumpet who giggles at Victporniana, says smutty lines which would have made the Carry On team blush (and would have got Lucy sent off to Doctor Jack's Asylum in period the story is set) and even snogging Mina in a little lesbian cut away.
Mina (a intelligent modern woman in the novel) played by Ryder channelling the ghost of Princess Diana. Is more wet than a cod-lings swimming costume. Yet still manages to get away with,walking with a stranger, watching an early porn movie (before they were invented) with a stranger and taking drugs with a stranger, activities which wouldn't be tolerated in that time period.
The scene where she drinks the Count's blood (which played as an oral rape scene in the novel and a demonstration of Dracula's ability to completely overpower her protectors) in this film plays as a tacky seduction... The Count is almost the victim here of Mina's lusts.
Van Helsing ala Hopkins is a truly bizarre creation. (surely he should have been cast as the Count not Oldman) Oldman is the saddest waste of this film. At turns camp as Christmas and then truly moving, and then barmy shouty and impossible to hear.
Only Dr Seward and Quincey Morris are close to their book counterparts.
How this film got released at all is a mystery.
Why it's still regarded so well beggars belief.
I still hope that one day someone will go back to the novel and make a film that translates it faithfully, with a cast and performances that match it's near perfection.