Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Once again, Lyz of And You Call Yourself A Scientist and Chad of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, have invited me along on one of their round table reviews. Here we look at two recent adaptations of classic horror movies, to see just how close to their sources they really are: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Dracula has spent the last few centuries living peacefully with his undead brides in his castle in Transylvania; now, however, he’s decided to branch out. After contacting a soliciting firm in London to purchase some land in and around London, he prepares fifty boxes of native soil and awaits the unfortunate solicitor sent to make his purchase official. Jonathan Harker grows mystified by the increasing fervor of superstitious terror he finds as he nears Dracula’s castle; little does he know the horrors that await him…
SOURCE:
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Dracula, by Bram Stoker
We used to get Book Fairs at my junior high school every few months- actually, it might have been a yearly thing, I don’t remember so well. (Most of my time is spent repressing memories of Massabesic JHS, even the pleasant ones. Eventually I hope to reach a state where I forget having gone there at all.) Book Fairs were pretty great, although moderately painful; having never received any allowance, it was rare that I would have money to actually buy one of the books which so appealed to me. But it was still a pleasure to look at them all, and imagine how cool it would be to own them.
Many of these books were cheap editions of public domain novels; I remember a particularly vivid cover of a Frankenstein, with a cliff, and lightning, and Frankenstein slowly climbing up to his enraged creation. Even more vivid (and, of course, more relevant here) was the cover of Dracula: the title was written in searing blood raid, and the illustration was of the pale befanged Count leaning over a young woman in her bed. Good, hot stuff, in other words.
I bought the copy of Frankenstein, but I never got my hands on the copy of Dracula, and didn’t get to see if the story inside matched the implications outside. I’m not exactly sure why, but it never occurred to me use the school library to get the novel for free; I’m moderately fetishistic about books, though (yeah, I guess the nice word is “bibliophile,” but we all know the truth, right), and I suspect, for me, owning the thing was at least half as important as reading it.
I did eventually get my own copy, but this was a Bantam Classics edition, and as such followed an entirely different marketing scheme. Classics, after all, must be classy, and even if we’re publishing a book about a guy who sucks the blood of women in their underthings, god forbid we view that as a selling point. Instead, we present a tasteful white back ground, with a small photograph of a painting of, well, I think it involved a forest and two people. Definitely nobody with big teeth.
I tried to read this copy, I really did; but I’d seen the most recent movie version of the story (of which more later), and the novel wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d expected it to be. I gave up a hundred pages before the end; my reasoning was, I already knew what was going to happen, why bother finishing?
Somehow, I managed to lose this copy of the book before I decided to give it another try. So when that time rolled around, I bought myself another copy. Since I was actually working for a library at the time, I’m even more baffled as to why I felt the need to purchase it. Perhaps I had the illusion of someday impressing folks with the scope of my bookshelf. (Since I didn’t have a bookshelf at that point, it was probably still the fetish thing.)
Anyway- and I am getting to some sort of point here, I promise- this edition had as bland a cover as the previous one. The background was a navy blue instead of white, and the painting on the front was of a weird looking woman lying in a sea of grass and yellow flowers, but you could still look at it and imagine soft piano music playing in the background.
What the hell? They do this to all the horror classics, of course. My Signet Classics printing of Frankenstein has a painting of ruins on the cover- but in that case, the classiness at least fits the philosophical nature of the book. Even if she doesn’t entirely succeed, Mary Shelley is trying for something powerfully moving and extremely profound. Dracula isn’t quite the same, though, and it’s interesting to see what the public perception of the book is in those covers. Obviously, all three editions are trying to sell themselves; the cheapest (it had that yellow-edged paper that you find on all crap books) is going for the lurid shock, while the latter two, the two which insist on the novel’s “classic” status, pretend as if it’s some sort of less feminine Wuthering Heights.
Actually, this points less to public perception and more (accidentally, I’d guess) to the split nature of the work itself. One gets the feeling that, were literary interviews being given at the time Bram Stoker was writing, he would have described his story as deeply pious and utterly moral. Which, in many ways, it is- but it is also full of bloodshed, barely repressed sexuality, and a sort of panting hysteria which is only expurgated in one final, dramatic act of ashen penetration. You kinda get the impression that Stoker wasn’t praying on the days he wrote certain scenes.
Or, even more likely, he was praying even harder than usual.
(Side digression: when I set out to read this book for the second time in order to prepare for this review, I thought I had lost my copy yet again, and checked a different edition out of the library. This one has what might be the best cover of the four: Bela Lugosi, in full Dracula regalia, leering out of the shadows. It’s the best because it shows how we primarily define the novel these days: as a source for hundreds of movie adaptations.)
That tendency towards the pious in Dracula becomes more and more prevalent as the novel nears its close, when it seems like every other page is taken up by Mina or Jonathan or Dr. Seward preaching on and on about the strength and the wonder and the purity of these great men and woman who have taken up arms against an ancient evil. These passages can be pretty tough going; they’re repetitive, annoying, and stop the plot with a screeching halt whenever they get going.
They are, however, part of what gives the latter third of the novel its power. While these pesky testimonials are a bit of a chore in and of themselves to get through, there is a fierceness to them that makes you incapable of doubting their sincerity. This fierce, clingy obsession with purity and wholesomeness is a direct contrast the corruption and horror that Dracula represents, and that contrast perversely means that every time a character begins evangelizing, the presence of the Count becomes almost palpable, because it is his existence which necessitates the heated quality of these devotions. Every time someone goes off on just how wonderfully wonderful all the vampire killers are so that everyone can get their courage up, we remember the creature they are pursuing; and it’s as if their fervor gives that darkness even more power. When I read this book all the way through the first time, I found myself simultaneously rolling my eyes at the preaching, while unable to let go; the stakes kept getting raised. There is a power here that Stoker grabs onto, a power which is crude and surprisingly effective- it is the power of two entirely contradictory ideas (like those different paperback covers) which are forced into conflict, and the sparks that fly from fury of that conflict.
Which is not to say that Dracula is a great novel: for one thing, the writing is often heavy-handed and trite, and while the story is told through a vast collection of journal entries and newspaper clippings, there’s never any real differentiation between the various narrative voices. For that matter, there’s precious little differentiation between the characters themselves. We get an idea of Mina, and Van Helsing; the former because she’s a woman of strong character and depth, and most likely more intelligent than the men who strive to protect her, and the latter mainly because he has a goofy German accent, and acts kind of odd. Oh, and speaking of odd, there’s also Renfield, who’s probably my favorite in the book; he’s mad much of the time, but his madness is wonderfully perverse, and his few moments of sanity are surprisingly tragic.
Okay, but to get back to the point I was trying to make: just about everyone else is a personality zero (all right, forget Lucy too, we sort of know who she is). Jonathan Harker? Well, he’s the guy who first met Dracula. Oh, and he’s a solicitor and he’s going to marry Mina. Dr. Seward? Er, he works at a mental institution, and Lucy won’t marry him. Lucy also won’t marry Quincey Morris, who is a Texan. That’s it. And yeah, it’s just as annoying as it sounds. She does decide to marry Lord Holmwood, whose major characteristic is his title, and the fact that his father dies.
All these men have things happen to them which are interesting, but stripped of their surroundings, it is impossible to tell them apart. It’s baffling as to why Stoker felt he needed of so many suitors for Lucy who, while a nice enough girl, isn’t exactly setting the world on fire or anything. Aside from making us fairly apathetic to them as individuals (I admit, I always liked Seward; but that’s because he’s an obsessive geek who gets dumped, and like follows like), it also achieves a queer melding effect, as the group forms a team whose members aren’t always distinguishable. Suddenly, even if you can’t root for the individuals because there’s nothing there to root for, you can root for the team as a whole, as all those rather sad little quirks of Harker, Seward, Holmwood, and Morris, when put together almost seem to form a whole person.
Story wise, we start with a bang, have a long middle stretch where the reader has to deal with always knowing more than the characters know, and then close out on a good detective/chase sequence. Despite what I’ve said about the novel’s latter section, I believe the most successful bit to be the opening chapters from Jonathan Harker’s journal, detailing his arrival at Dracula’s castle, and his slowly dawning horror at just what the Count is. Taken alone, these chapters would work as an excellent short story (I think I stole that from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre- but that’s okay, because he’s right); the pacing is tight, there’s only one narrator so we can’t tell the writing is weak (after all, first person perspective is the best way to hide weak writing), and the encounters with Dracula and his brides are dealt sparingly but effectively. When placed in context, it’s a terrific bit of set-up; in a way, it’s almost too good, because Dracula never quite lives up to expectations. Once he gets to London, he drains one woman, and barely gets a start on a second before a bunch of uppity mortals chase him away. This is an evil which has lived centuries?
Dracula’s weakness could be viewed as intentional on Stoker’s part, however, because one of the prevailing themes of the novel is the triumph of modern technology and ingenuity against a creature of the Old World. Mina is especially important in this regard; it’s her idea to type up all the journal entries and news clippings relevant to their struggle against the Count, and collect the information together in order to more easily both understand exactly what happened before, and try to determine the Count’s next move.
Even more importantly, perhaps, is the strong vitality that runs through all the vampire killers (even Van Helsing), a vitality that shows itself in all those glowing praises each person heaps on each other person. The majority of them are young, vital, and committed to a cause, and Dracula can’t help but flee before them despite their threats. His one major hit against his enemies- the attempted corruption of Mina- disheartens them, but fails to break them apart; once they joined together, it became a matter of time before they destroyed their foe, regardless of the cost. No matter what his power, he has existed for too long as the same creature, in the same circumstances; he cannot reason quite as quickly as his enemies, and he lacks their passion of purpose.
SCREEN:
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Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppolla
More nostalgia: I went to see this with my dad when it was first released, which was a mite uncomfortable. I was just around puberty at this point, and sitting next to Dad while various ladies in various states of undress (including a topless Monica Belucci!) writhed around making all sorts of noises, well, I wasn’t entirely sure if I should be feeling dirty or not.
Regardless of how uncomfortable I was, I became obsessed with the movie; I got the published screenplay (which had lots of full color photos of Sadie Frost, yum) and the soundtrack- first soundtrack I ever bought, I think, and it taught me valuable lesson; I don’t care for soundtracks. I respect them as the art-form they are, but they put me to sleep.
I did not, however, buy the novelization; even at that point in my formative years, I recognized something odd about having to do a novelization of a movie that made a point of advertising that it was a faithful adaptation of a classic novel. (I actually got the novelization off of
Yes, yes, I know. I was young and stupid, what can I say?
I didn’t see the movie for a second time until I sat down to review it this month. And wow. I thought it would be an interesting, but flawed movie; instead, I found it was a flawed, but flawed movie. This is the sort of thing that gives people headaches; the sort of movie that manages to be wrong from the very first shot, and doesn’t stop being wrong till you’ve rewinded the tape and returned it to Blockbuster.
Where to start? Well, there’s the enraging arrogance of the title. On his commentary track for the first Godfather, Francis Ford Coppolla says he’s proud that, whenever he makes a movie based on a novel, he puts the author’s name at the head of the title. This is a commendable trait; at least it is when the movie in question is one that manages to respect and/or improve on its source material, like The Godfather does. (The book is fun and a quick read, but it’s essentially escapism; the movie, and its sequel, are tragedy.) But in this case, it’s like he’s thumbing his nose at the book. When you turn the villain of the novel into a romantic anti-hero for your movie, you’re not being true to the original work, and your certainly not being true to the author’s intentions. Common decency asks that you minimize said author’s involvement in the project.
Of course, if that were the worst thing, we could overlook it; good art can justify nearly everything. But you get to movie proper and it’s a mess. It’s a mess made by someone who decided to push everything in all the wrong directions. Brannagh’s Frankenstein looks positively reserved compared to this- not only does the camera pull the same swooping tricks, we also get bombarded by as many visual effects as possible; while many of these are cool individually (I particularly like the water that drips upward in Dracula’s castle, which I think is ripped off from Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete), when crammed together with the similarly hysterical acting and production design, the cumulative effective is to numb the viewer almost immediately. We can’t invest in the movie because it’s all too much- and unlike a Ken Russell picture, where that numbing is part of the satirical intention (and the shocks are invariably grotesque enough to prevent one from ever being numbed entirely), Coppola truly does want the viewer to identify with his characters and be moved by their plight. Which is damnably difficult to do when your lead actress is wearing a see through night gown in the nineteenth century.
The telling of the story itself doesn’t help much in this regard. There is a detachment to all of it, an attempt to say one thing while meaning another thing, and at the same time believing in something else entirely.
What that effect might be, I have no idea; I do know that Lucy’s slow death and eventual resurrection should not come off as the unfunny black comedy it is here. We have Van Helsing spouting off on the poor deceased girl being “The Devil’s Concubine,” and it is impossible to take Lord Holmwood seriously in his grief; Cary Elwes has always had a bit of a smirk on him, but while that smirk worked to his advantage in The Princess Bride (where he had enough of a character to actually attain some moments of sincerity), here, when added to the fact that as written Holmwood is pretty much a non-entity anyway, that smirk negates what little empathy the audience might have achieved with him over losing his wife.
However, this in and of itself is also not automatically a problem. It is a valid artistic choice to play up the unintentional dark humor of Stoker’s novel, and while putting Stoker’s name above the title does seem a bit suspect, I could still forgive the lapse and at least respect the movie if it had any point to it.
But there is no point- too much of the story seems like filler which Coppola had no real respect for, filler to kill time between the scenes of what the movie is really about, the relationship between Mina and Dracula. I’ll get to my problems with that relationship in the next section, but even ignoring its myriad of flaws, it doesn’t make any sense to refuse to lend the rest of the movie any real legitimacy. We can’t take the vampire hunters seriously because they are neutered (or made impotent, as Keanu Reeves’ Harker so subtly points out) by their blandness, their buffoonery, and their utter lack of comprehension as to what’s really going on around them. We can’t completely dismiss them, however, because Coppola himself can’t- they still kill the resurrected Lucy, they still are able to chase Dracula out of London and back to his lair. If the screenplay and direction had been willing to commit itself over to satirizing these Victorian heroes and their wooden stakes, that would have been a valid choice. Instead, we get this lame duck half-assed measure, forcing us in and out of the movie at every turn, and reducing it to a series of interesting camera angles and beautiful (if utterly ridiculous) sets. Coppola attempts to keep both the heart of the book and his idea of what the heart of the book should be- unfortunately, when beating at odds with one another, they serve to render the end result unbalanced and, in the end, unaffecting.
Before I move on, I suppose I should mention the rest of the movie’s actors, just to give you an idea of what their contributions to this imbalance were. Gary Oldman gets top billing, and he’s unsurprisingly good, even if he is playing a Dracula whose motivations seem to shift every other scene. Winona Ryder is, well, Winona Ryder as Mina, and one never gets a sense of her as a woman that could possibly belong in the century she’s supposed to be living in. Same with her intended, Keanu Reeves, who delivers what may be his worst performance in a movie that I’ve seen; he’s embarrassingly bad, the sort of work you only expect to see in low budget flicks that can’t afford better, and infuriatingly, he makes Harker an utter write off. One is not surprised at the speed with which Mina throws him over for a handsome foreigner.
I liked Anthony Hopkins, mostly because I think he’s well cast as Van Helsing; there’s a certain thoughtful, brutal sanity to all of his work that fits the character well- here is a man we can easily imagine cutting off a corpse’s head and stuffing garlic in its mouth, with no compunctions over the supposed immorality of the act. Unfortunately, the script refuses to play fair with him, and instead of getting a wise, extremely intense professor and pseudo-knight, we get a wacky, tactless foreigner who can’t seem to understand why those around him are always shocked by his brutality. Personally, I’d like to think Hopkins at least tried to play the character straight; in those scenes where he is explaining the vampire, and the importance of tracking that vampire down, he is convincing and powerful.
Of the rest of the cast, only Sadie Frost stands out as Lucy, and that’s probably for all the wrong reasons. My main impression of Lucy after seeing the movie the first time was that she was a tease and had very red hair; watching it again, I was not dissuaded from those impressions. One can’t very well blame the actress, who is required to spend much of the movie writhing and moaning with the intensity of one experiencing a perpetual orgasm. Oddly enough, though, this writhing takes place before Lucy’s conversion to vampirism. Once she gets turned, she loses much of her sensuality, although how much of that is due to her Queen Elizabeth-ish wedding dress, is difficult to say.
Tom Waits was cool as Renfield, but then, he’s Tom Waits. He’d be cool as a bellhop.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
On a surface level, it would seem that Francis Ford Coppola and his screenwriter James Hart make good on the implicit promise of their title, by hewing far closer to the book than generally any other previous adaptation had done before. However, this is quickly shown false to even the most disinterested viewer; over and over again, key themes and relationships in the source material are undermined or disregarded, and the main idea of the story, a group of brave individuals who come together to destroy a near immortal evil, is entirely contradicted. One wonders if Coppola or Hart had any idea just how far they were straying from Stoker’s work with their few “small” alterations; certainly there’s no indication in the publicity material for the film that either were contemptuous of the original novel.
Still, the changes are there, and boy do they suck. (Ha!)
Here’s a small pet peeve, before we dig into the painful stuff: I mentioned above that my favorite section of the novel is the nearly self-contained tale of Jonathan Harker’s arrival and imprisonment at Castle Dracula. Clearly, this sequence is not going to work as well in this movie; at the very least, Keanu “Man of Wood” Reeves is won’t hold our sympathies for very long. My problem is that, instead of showing this part of the story in straight sequence, and only returning to England when Harker makes good his intention of escaping, Coppola chooses to cut in with scenes of Mina and Lucy frolicking, Lucy getting three proposals, Lucy and Mina frolicking in a rainstorm barely clad, exchanging passionate kisses- in other words, he starts the main plot (?) while the set-up hasn’t really been resolved. It’s not a huge thing, and I’m not sure anyone else would be bothered by it- but for me, it robs that opening of what little power it still had. The more important part of the story begins while Harker is still trapped, rendering his incarceration nearly irrelevant; we want to watch where Dracula is, not see some guy being slowly sucked to death by barely naked women.
Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true; but you see what I’m getting at. Harker’s torment, once the springboard that gave the rest of the novel its forward momentum, now seems an afterthought. Cutting up that opening hamstrings its effectiveness, and that pisses the writer in me off.
This is far from the movie’s worst sin, adaptation wise. That would have to be the transformation of the titular character from a decadent, utterly evil demon to a tragically romantic warrior of love. This change begins with the beginning, where we get a brief history lesson on our Drac, and watch him deny God when his beloved wife kills herself. Dracula stabs a cross, and blood starts to flow, and the music is pounding, and, well, are we supposed to be impressed here? His armor is cool looking, anyway.
The next we see of Dracula is centuries later when Harker arrives at his doorstep. This Dracula is, strange hair-do and ostentatious robe aside, quite close to his literary counterpart. He is clearly threatening, without ever being overtly so, and keeps evincing all sorts of eerie powers; the crawl down the ramparts is a nice moment, as is his ecstatic licking clean of Harker’s blood-stained razor. However, Harker, like a good little boyfriend, has brought a picture of his fiancé along with him, and when Dracula sees it, he is instantly smitten.
Which is not surprising, considering Mina is the spitting-image of Drac’s former, defenestrating beloved, Elisabeth.
Cue vomit sounds.
Look, I realize the concept has antecedents in other, better movies. And I’m sure, given the right context, I could probably deal with it. But on its own, I find Reincarnated Romance (lovers finding each other in future lives) to be a goofy, relentlessly idiotic plot device. There is this assumption that one is supposed to be terribly impressed by the intensity of love these two must share, to find each other after so many decades- well, I don’t buy it. Far too often, these reunions are dictated entirely by fate; and I find the idea of being so controlled by forces I don’t understand that I routinely meet the same person over and over and over again to be more disturbing than romantic. Also why should I care about a couple that so obviously has all the decks stacked in their favor?
For Reincarnated Romance to work, the lovers have to be a closed unit- they will sacrifice anything and anyone around them to be together, and this is supposed to be some noble fulfillment of destiny. To me, it’s obsessively selfish behavior that borders on madness; but then, I’m just an old grump anyway.
Back to the movie; yeah, Dracula gets to meet again the woman that drove him to darkness, or at least the most recent Xerox of her. Aside from my hatred of the basic idea, there is something very, very wrong about patching RR onto Stoker’s novel.
For one thing, it utterly violates the character as originally written. Here’s a passage from the novel, when Dracula finds his “brides” attempting to violate Harker:
“’You yourself never loved; you never love!’ On this the other women joined,
and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it
almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the
Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:-
‘Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?’”
The only “love” Dracula has, can ever have, is the “love” of feeding. The only desire he can feel is toward his food, and even that is a twisted, perverse feeling. All emotion for Dracula is wrong, at least in our conception of it- he is a creature who has lost whatever humanity he once had, and now exists purely to satisfy his own propensity to keep on existing.
The movie turns this all on its ear; while the vampire we first see in his lair is precisely this sort of alien, ancient evil, when he arrives on England’s shores, he transforms into the seducer of a Harlequin romance novel, badgering Mina until she relents to spend time with him, relentlessly beating her down with his foreign accent and social naiveté, and when he gets an opportunity to drain her dry, refraining from doing so. He loves her “purely,” so suddenly he’s no longer the dark villain he should be, but a sympathetic, tragic anti-hero yadayadayada. It’s inane. (Note to self: buy thesaurus for more synonyms of “absurd” and “idiotic.” These reviews have tapped me out.)
It also, inevitably, destroys Mina’s character as well. Gone is the strong, intelligent, faithful woman of the book; instead we get- Winona Ryder, with all that entails. Keep in mind, I think Ryder can be pretty damn good, but she’s miscast in the role; unlike Oldman, she doesn’t have the presence to even try grounding the silly situation she’s thrown into. To be honest, it’s difficult to imagine anyone giving a sympathetic performance as this version of Ms. Murray. Not only does she throw over her engaged-and-still-missing husband for the first stalker she meets, she also chooses to drink Dracula’s blood in the crucial corruption scene; Drac is all set up to turn her, then thinks better of it and pulls away, and then Mina pulls him in and sucks the cut at his breast.
Let us stop and marvel at the awfulness of such a moment. Not only is it far enough opposite the source material as to be nearly sacrilegious, it makes a complete hash of the story that follows. One of the driving forces behind the vampire hunters in the climactic final pursuit of the Count is Mina’s slow descent into vampirism, and the knowledge that, unless they are able to kill Dracula, she will eventually turn and have to be killed herself.
Now, please explain to me how that can work if Mina choose to turn voluntarily?
Here’s how: she never tells any of them. Not even a hint. They know she’s in trouble, of course, but she never tells them exactly what happened. You could argue that it was Dracula’s influence that drove her to do it, but how can that be when Drac is so clearly trying to push her away? And there is never any strong implication that Dracula is clouding her mind; instead, we are led to believe that Mina is losing herself in her past, remembering what it was like to be Elisabeth, and through this throwing herself over to her former hubby. When she acts horrified at her uncleanliness, and assists the hunters in their search, one can’t help but wonder just what the hell her motives are. Ambiguity can be a powerful tool, but here, it merely dilutes the impact of what should be the most exciting and moving part of the film.
The other big change, with equally disastrous results, is the sex thing.
At this point, everybody knows vampirism is all about sex. Everybody knows Bram Stoker was this repressed fruitcake who put all sorts of deliciously dirty subtext into his work. It’s a cliché that’s been beaten into the ground so many times it is almost impossible to imagine a Dracula without the between-the-lines sensuality.
So why, oh why, does Coppola think he’s so bloody clever when he makes nearly every moment in the movie about sex? What’s he trying to do here? Every kiss goes French almost immediately; every woman who can run around half naked in the rain is required to do so; impotency is mentioned, venereal disease discussed, and apparently one of the reasons Mina is having difficulty with her soon-to-be husband is that he’s not putting out enough. (Admittedly, when one looks at Keanu Reeves, one suspects intelligent conversation is not his major selling point.)
My personal favorite is Dracula’s first attack on Lucy: she sleepwalks into the massive garden (which is supposed to be a cemetery, by the way, if anyone was paying attention to the book), and is raped by a werewolf.
As I said in my notes: “How can the bite be a sexual metaphor when they’re actually having sex?”
Other vampire movies have gone this far before; other vampire movies have had somebody biting somebody else as a particularly nasty form of coitus interruptus; but that only makes the problem here even more apparent. The strength of Dracula throughout the ages is in its suppression, not expression, of explicit sexual detail. By coming out and shoving all this stuff in our face, not only does the movie become puerile, it loses the power of the story it was so eager to tell in the first place. If you make a choice like this, you need to actually justify it in someway; you need to be making a new statement that will hold the viewers attention, something to replace all the energy you lost by letting Lois and Clark finally get married, so to speak. And aside from some silly implication that women are free sexual creatures and men are repressive bores, no such theme is presented.
I’ve seen this DVD on the shelf at Best Buy for a while now, and I had been long tempted to buy it- I had fond memories of seeing it with Dad, and while I’d heard bad reviews, I figured it was just from people who went in expecting the wrong thing.
Boy, am I glad I didn’t buy that DVD. (Not that you shouldn’t, or anything. Go now! Buy many!)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a good novel, one that every horror fan needs to take a chance on. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a mess. Rent it if you want to pause on Winona Ryder braless in a sheer nightgown. You’ll get more out of it than I did.
SOURCE: QQQ.5
SCREEN: Q.5
Whatever happened to Sadie Frost, anyway?
Had enough? I thought not.
For more Bram Stoker action, hope on over to Chad’s review.
For the other half of this pair from hell, try Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Finally, check out the three-way where Chad, Lyz and I rip into both these films. How’s that for content!