Directed by John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames), this lavish version of Bram Stoker's Dracula presents the infamous vampire (played by Frank Langella) as a handsome and irresistibly seductive creature, who uses his brooding sexual magnetism to beguile his female victims, Mina Van Helsing (Jan Francis) and Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan). Other Draculas had been presented as sexy, but not to quite the extent that Langella's count is in this film - he's quite the lady killer (literally!). Attempting to stop Dracula from taking his fiancé Lucy for his bride is Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve), aided by Mina's father Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier).
With excellent performances (including another great turn by horror legend Donald Pleasence as Lucy's father Dr. Seward), superb cinematography and a wonderfully rousing score by John Williams, Badham's Dracula is excellent entertainment, even though it does stray from the novel quite a bit, altering the relationships and names of some of the characters and transposing all of the action to Edwardian England (with Harker never setting foot in Transylvania). I was more annoyed by the tarantula in Carfax Abbey, a bit out of place, but not as daft as the armadillos in the 1931 Dracula.
Badham goes all out with the 'gothicness', delivering several amazingly atmospheric scenes that are amongst the most visually striking in vampire cinema: Langella climbing down the wall of Dr. Seward's asylum to reach Mina, a seduction scene with a blood-red laser backdrop, and the white horse in the misty cemetery stomping on Mina's grave. The production design is perhaps a little over the top (Carfax Abbey looks like a Halloween theme park attraction) but it is certainly memorable. As far as visceral horror goes, the throat gouging of the captain of the Demeter and Renfield's head being wrenched backwards should do the trick.
For some, the romanticism/sexiness of the production, and the alterations to the story, will be reason enough to dislike Badham's movie, but in my opinion this version is far more preferable to Coppola's 1992 movie, which does exactly the same thing, only in a less enjoyable fashion.
With excellent performances (including another great turn by horror legend Donald Pleasence as Lucy's father Dr. Seward), superb cinematography and a wonderfully rousing score by John Williams, Badham's Dracula is excellent entertainment, even though it does stray from the novel quite a bit, altering the relationships and names of some of the characters and transposing all of the action to Edwardian England (with Harker never setting foot in Transylvania). I was more annoyed by the tarantula in Carfax Abbey, a bit out of place, but not as daft as the armadillos in the 1931 Dracula.
Badham goes all out with the 'gothicness', delivering several amazingly atmospheric scenes that are amongst the most visually striking in vampire cinema: Langella climbing down the wall of Dr. Seward's asylum to reach Mina, a seduction scene with a blood-red laser backdrop, and the white horse in the misty cemetery stomping on Mina's grave. The production design is perhaps a little over the top (Carfax Abbey looks like a Halloween theme park attraction) but it is certainly memorable. As far as visceral horror goes, the throat gouging of the captain of the Demeter and Renfield's head being wrenched backwards should do the trick.
For some, the romanticism/sexiness of the production, and the alterations to the story, will be reason enough to dislike Badham's movie, but in my opinion this version is far more preferable to Coppola's 1992 movie, which does exactly the same thing, only in a less enjoyable fashion.