Overrated, but still watchable

Rating: 7/10 (6 October 2015)

After returning home to London, a lawyer finds that his friends' strange behavior is caused by a vampire count looking for a reincarnation of his lost love and sets out with a professional hunter to stop him before it's accomplished
When this one really tried to, it had some really nice stuff to it. The main to it is that there's some wonderful, individual scenes here, starting with a really creepy scene near the beginning where a man walks through a foggy, dark cemetery as he hears voices throughout and out-of-nowhere runs into a black-hooded figure holding a lantern in front of a horse-and-carriage, a prisoner strung-out dealing with the brides in a dried out, decaying pit in the castle basement and the action of being on the ship has a few really neat scenes. The longer ones are also worthwhile, with the main one being the appearance of the brides as it's not enough to have three women appear topless in elegant Gothic gowns but to do it from within a bed-sheet next to their target is impressive and adds a dream-like quality to the film. Also quite good are the scenes depicting the start of the transportation, which is represented with a series of really nice and impressive dream scenes that are at first merely flash cuts of horrific images before giving way to a tense chase through a maze and finally to a hairy creature feasting upon a blood-soaked victim. Even more impressive is that it leads to the scene of the creature's attacks in real life, watching an unknown beast claw through several guards in violent manner through its POV is really fun and enjoyable. The other part here that works are the fun, action-packed bookends to the film, with the opening on the battlefield and the castle-ground finale is pretty good while the ending assault at the castle itself is a highlight. These here are the film's good points as this here was pretty problematic at times. The biggest thing to this is the length, which is pretty big at two hours. This one is really epic yet only feels that way for reasons that have no bearing on why it should be. The first is that scenes tend to drag on forever that could've been shortened since they take too long to make their point. The most obvious one here is the first scene in the castle which manages to occupy twenty-minutes of time as Dracula rattles off several speeches about being in love that lasts for quite a longer time than it should have. As well, this one works for the fighting in the tavern as it's quite boring watching Dracula hurl people into furniture before making ominous threats. The other factor which brings out the length is the seeming multitude of scenes that are so useless they never needed to be there, like the two walking around London trying to win her over with his charms, the scenes of the two girls joking around at the party and the scene of them in the garden talking about the wedding. These are mostly responsible for the film's length here. The last flaw is the dearth of blood and gore amongst the body count, with this one really should've had more for as big as it is but it's not as detrimental as the other flaws. Otherwise, this one wasn't all that bad and had some good points to it.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language, Brief Nudity and a sex scene.