Category: Dracula movies
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On one hand, with the Wojciech Kilar score, Bram Stoker’s Dracula can get away with just about anything. On the other, with Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves playing leads… well, it needs something to help it get away with anything. It helps neither Ryder or Reeves are the actual star of the film. Neither is…
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Dracula’s Daughter starts as a comedy. With Billy Bevan’s bumbling police constable, there’s nothing else to call it. Sure, the opening deals with the immediate aftermath of the original Dracula–returning Edward Van Sloan arrested for driving a stake through a man’s heart–but it’s all for smiles, if not laughs. Bevan’s terrified expressions carry the movie…
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To put it mildly, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is narratively erratic. The film–a filmed ballet “converted” to a silent movie–opens with panic over Eastern Europeans entering Britain. At least, the onscreen text implies this panic. It’s quickly forgotten; after doing cast introductions (also with onscreen text–these aren’t intertitles, these are just text onscreen…
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A lot of Drácula’s hundred minute runtime is spent with Eduardo Arozamena talking really slow to José Soriano Viosca and Barry Norton. Arozamena’s Professor Van Helsing (so nice to have such a familiar “brand” you can just talk about the characters and assume some passing familiarity) and Viosca and Norton are the guys who need…
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Even though it still falls apart at the end, this truncated, eight millimeter version of Dracula is better than the regular version. It’s exactly what I was hoping for from these Castle Films digests. All of the long dialogue scenes are gone. There’s no explanation of vampires, the entire sequence before London is gone, no…
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I read somewhere the Japanese started producing anime because there was no way to combat live action American imports. With its narration and lame plotting (it somehow isn’t epical–maybe because Tomb of Dracula was produced for television, complete with convenient commercial breaks), it’s an awful way spend ninety minutes. Unfortunately the entire cast isn’t credited,…
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I read somewhere the Japanese started producing anime because there was no way to combat live action American imports. With its narration and lame plotting (it somehow isn’t epical–maybe because Tomb of Dracula was produced for television, complete with convenient commercial breaks), it’s an awful way spend ninety minutes. Unfortunately the entire cast isn’t credited,…
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Son of Dracula doesn’t open well. The first scene’s all right, but once Louise Allbritton shows up–in the second scene–things start to go downhill. Allbritton’s one of the film’s constant problems. She’s a terrible actress and, in a film in desperate need of all the acting help it can get, it’s a significant defect. The…
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I never got Dracula. Even as a kid, I never watched it over and over, like I did the other Universal monster movies. When I went back and saw it in the late 1990s–after Ed Wood–Bela Lugosi’s performance horrified me. He makes funny faces and does Charles Atlas exercises for scary body language and woodenly…
The Stop Button 