Pound for pound, the worst acting in any major movie

Rating: 5/10 (9 September 1999)

Here's a question from the Cultural Aptitude Test. Warren Spahn is to Casey Stengel as Tom Waits is to ........??? Warren Spahn pitched for Casey Stengel in the 1940's for some woeful Boston Braves teams in the years before Mathews and Aaron showed up. He also pitched for Casey in the 1960's for some woeful Mets teams in the days before Tom Seaver showed up. In between, from 1949 to 1960, Casey won ten pennants in twelve years, including five consecutive World Series. Spahnie was fond of pointing out that he was the only man who worked for Casey before and after he was a genius. My analogy doesn't work perfectly for Tom Waits and Francis Ford Coppola, because the chronology is off. Waits never worked in Coppola's pre-Godfather movies, but he worked in some when Coppola's genius seemed to be in remission. Most glaringly, he was Renfield in Dracula.
What a disappointment it must have been for Coppola to read the reviews of this movie. He was a certified genius, he got enough money to make a comeback big-budget movie, and this is what he churned out. Don't think the movie is without value. If you nominated this as the most visually splendid movie in your knowledge, I would not dispute that at all. The recreations of Gothic Transylvania and Gaslit Victorian London are splendid - sometimes beautiful, sometimes chilling. But what possessed him to cast this cast?
First there is Dracula. Let's see, we need the most over-the-top actor in the business. Shatner is too old and fat, and Larry Storch is too silly - how about Gary Oldman? His movements and monologues are so exaggerated and campy as to make Burt Ward look like a master of subtlety. I laughed out loud several times when I watched the tape, especially when he took Keanu's shaving razor and licked the blood off of it. Tom Waits, the skid row Sinatra, matches Oldman measure for measure, an overacting symphony unmatched since Shatner himself went toe-to-toe with Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.
The rest of the cast is equally atrocious. Keanu Reeves is Harker, the brilliant young London attorney. OK, let's pause on that one. You want to cast an actor who can be convincing as a brilliant young 19th century attorney, and you want him to speak with an aristocratic accent from Victorian London? Who would you hire? I'll bet not one of you out there would have been stupid enough to hire Keanu Reeves, but that's exactly who the genius Coppola came up with. Cary Elwes was right there on the set, in the cast in a minor part, and could easily have handled Harker in a workmanlike and professional way, but no-o-o-o-o, get me Keanu. "Whoa, bitchin', vampire-dude!"
And what was the deal with that Cowboy guy? "Now jes' hold on there, Dracula, you orn'rey sidewindin' bloodsuckin' whippersnapper, or I'll blast ya to kingdom come, pardner".
You know what happened, don't you? It was the emperor's new clothes. Hundreds of smart people involved in the movie knew it was full of malarkey and they knew exactly why, but nobody had the chutzpah to look the great genius in the eye and say so. Who could presume to question the guy who did "Apocalypse Now"? Same thing happened to Tarkovsky when he made "Nostalghia".
The plot centers around Dracula's search for the reincarnation of his centuries-ago true love. Of course, he was looking a little better back in the 1400's, when she committed suicide, thinking him dead. A sweet love story amid the Gothic wreckage? Phantom of the Soap Opera? Well, I suppose Winona isn't going to get a lot of action from Keanu Reeves, so why not take on Drac?
The movie won the great genius three statuettes, for things like make up and costumes and sound effects. Talk about damning with faint praise. How many sleepless nights have you passed wondering who would win the Oscar for best Sound Effects Editing?
I could have forgiven the comic opera acting because of the movie's strengths, but the movie had one unforgiveable element. It is boring. Tedious. Seems infinitely long. Stylish, but not scary. In the entertainment field, boredom is the only true sin. I loved the first 15 minutes, then I had to fight off sleep except during the unintentionally comic interludes. My friend Count Floyd sent over these tips for you youngsters who want to make scary monster chiller horror films (1) Speeches aren't scary (2) Monsters that can be clearly seen and defined aren't scary. People fear the unknown, the unseen, the shadowy, the unexplained. When you show things too clearly, they start to seem familiar, or comical, or trite.