Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) - Page 2

Just watching this again for the first time in years on cable. Despite all my complaints about this and the amount of things Coppola gets so wrong, fuck me this is sumptuous to watch. It's the old fashioned falseness of everything that gives it a beautiful and colourful charm that claws a lot of my bad will back. Visually speaking, Francis knew exactly what he was doing.

...and screw the haters, Oldman is the fucking shit as The Count.

I almost leapt across my kitchen table and the beat the shit out of a friend of mine this very afternoon because she bagged out Tom Waits in this.

No bagging of Waits Renfield - EVER.

It's on SciFi Channel now if you've got Foxtel mate.

This would be a pretty amazing film to have a score-only audio option, ala Leon.

The only thing holding it back then would be Keanu's dead doll eyes.

Yeah, this is pretty inexcusable behavior. Then again, I'll apologize for Waits in anything, even if he made gonzo porn with him and a yard full of chickens.
Also, this. Insert "dead, lifeless, like a doll's eye" quote from JAWS.

At the time, Keanu's performance was utterly shitful and dragged the whole film down every time he was onscreen and opened his mouth, but years of being subjected to his particular and unique brand of thespianism have made his effort in this film feel less shit.
Could be battered wife syndrome, but he doesn't taint the film quite as badly as I used to think he did.

It's battered wife syndrome.

I actually think Keanu is decent when he's cast properly, but he's really awful in Dracula.

Still haven't opened the packaging on my Blu-Ray of this. Last time I watched it was on the Superbit DVD. Love the production values on this movie.

To be fair, Winona is equally terrible. She just has killer tits, so we go easy on her.

Yeah, Jesus: Tits aside, Winona is horrific in this. When this came out I was desperately in love with her, like most guys my age probably, but this and Age of Innocence really killed it for me.

Only that it was directed by Guy Maddin, which seems to be about as perfect a match of artist and material as possible. Haven't yet seen it.

I saw BS Dracula when it came out, and found it flawed yet gorgeous, in line with most all the reasons listed above. It's a movie I've always been reluctant to revisit, on the chance that I'd like it less now. The wretched follow-up of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein didn't help.

See, I thought she killed in Age of Innocence. Didn't require an accent and it played to her somewhat darker/slightly devious strengths.

Sorry but Sadie Frosts cleavage walks off with the entire film under their arm.

Not to turn this thread into a boob-fest, but Sadie Frosts cleavage in Dracula is the best cleavage ever filmed.

FWIW, the Topps comic series was pretty awesome. 4 comics drawn by Mignola all about Dracula. I really enjoyed the film for its art direction and incredible visuals. Still watch it every few Halloweens.

Honestly, the 35% or so of the film that mirrors Stokers actual novel are just fantastic and I'm not an "it's not like the book therefor it's shit" kinda guy normally.

I'm all for adaptations taking their own path as long as they stay true to the spirit of the source, I just don't think Coppola did this with his doomed love angle. He turned it into Anne Rice's Dracula - point utterly fucking missed.

If it hadn't been called "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and had better actors (meaning Keanu and Ryder) to sell the love story, I don't think it would have been an issue.

Agreed, but it was and it did.

The definiative adaptation of Stokers novel is yet to be made.

I just looked this film up and realized it was written by the same guy who bought us "Hook".
Explains a bit.

Explains a lot.

Never knew that.

I had an old vhs of this film, and pulled it out due to this thread and halloween. I hadn't watched it since it came out.

I really think this is a Superman Returns interesting failure. I love the direction, and the music. Gary Oldman was amazing.

Keanu Reeves doing an english accent? Well it sucked, but Costner didn't even try for Robin Hood (interesting tid bit that the Robin Hood with an english accent is in this film).

Everything else sucked.

Just imagine if George Lucas came in with the mindset Coppola had about everthing being practical and in camera?

This film shits all over Superman Returns.
All over it. From a great height. Covering it.
In shit.

I agree totally - I love this movie. It's beautifully shot and a guilty pleasure for me all at the same time.

This film feels like someone watched one of those super cool early trailers with the Hopkins narration and the booming ominous music and Oldman doing his awesome evil laugh and then made a feature length parody of it.

I meant more that its an interesting failure.

I actually really like Ryder. Go figure. I saw "RB" when I was like 6 years old, and it had a deeply profound impact on me and my perception of the 90s. My understanding of my own life has been greatly informed by the story in that film, and I often think that if my life were put to film I'd be written as the Ryder character (definitely not the Janeane Garofalo character. I can't stand her! Plus her rhymes were just awful in that film, I'm much better at matching homonyms. "Don't bogart that can, man"? Give me a break, that's hardly a rhyme at all. Try matching "Million Dolla -Chai Walla", then I'll be impressed)

With that said, I love this movie, and have seen it over 20 times. Aside from Keanu and a few other slight issues, it's madly brilliant and a wonderfully passionate Victorian horror story. I love the look of the film too, what Coppola was able to achieve on sound stages alone is kind of a small miracle. It helps add to the surreal look of the film during the outdoor scenes.


Oh, and the score. Bum bum badada dum! That never gets old

I can't love the often grossly hammy melodrama of the Hammer Dracula films but hate this, that's just not possible; shit, I even like Dracula A.D. 1972, and that film gives my sensible side almost every reason not to.

Though it contains the tragic/romantic angle to Dracula and to vampires that I've never really enjoyed (I vastly prefer Christopher Lee's "I'm evil for no fucking reason at all except that I'm Dracula"), I think Coppola did well here, and that the film mostly gets lumps because he did it, and we somehow expected or wanted more.

Having recently re-watched Herzog's Nosferatu for the first time 13 years, I will say that few, if any, sequences in Coppola's film and in any Dracula adaptation period, beats Harker's journey to Castle Dracula as depicted in Herzog's version, but the there is something to be said for the phantasmagorical artifice that Coppola was going for. It's entirely devoted to the weird, and to the operatic, and to the melodramatic. It's filled with shit that can never, ever happen, and it does whatever it wants to do because it can. It's not a guilty pleasure for me, it's just a pleasure.

That's what I love about it. Things like the stage coach driver's arm's impossibly long grasp when it helps Keanu into the coach. Or the stuff Drac's shadow gets up to. Weird as hell, inventive, and very very creepy. Half the time you aren't even sure you saw it.. "Did his shadow just leave the room .5 seconds after the door closed?"

Still wrong.
It's not a failure. Not even remotely. It wasn't a failure financially and it's not a failure artistically. It's a beautiful, evocative, wonderful film hampered by some less than awesome performances which, for me and many others who have posted here, are not so grievous the movie's many, many strengths are squished.

The romance doesn't work. And that was a major factor of this interpretation of the story so it absolutely needed to work. You can never really buy Winona in the role, so no matter how much effort Oldman puts into the tragic romance angle ..well, considering that, I don't think interesting failure is such an off the mark description.

Eh. Depends on how you want to take the word "Failure" I guess. I find it too negative a term to use as an overall description of this one. Makes it sound like there is more bad than good to it, which I really don't believe is the case.

I like, even love in some cases, a lot of films that I have no hesitance in calling interesting failures. I know the films don't completely work, but there is something interesting about them that draws me back. I wouldn't take it as a complete negative, a nail in the coffin of the filmmaker's efforts, just an observation of the whole and a means of stepping back and unbiasedly judging how well they pulled off what they intended to do.

Exactly.

And to complain about the performances is to completely miss the point. There's a tone/mood Coppola was going for, and everyone was game, even if only Oldman and Hopkins knock it out of the park.

If tone and mood is the only thing I thought Coppola was striving for with this then I'd say that you are correct, I must have missed the point. But I don't think that is the case.

Watched this with the girlfriend for the first time in years. I agree with everyone that calls out the romance, as it completely drags down the 2nd act.

 

It also undermines Dracula's reasons for going to London in the first place: he obviously didn't know about Mina until he sees Harker's picture of her, so why the journey? 

 

The end, as well, is a complete dismissal of the rest of the movie. Even with the love story, Dracula is asking Mina to be his wife in darkness, so how can God forgive Dracula at the very end? HE'S EVIL and never even repents. 

 

What I do love about this movie is the heightened sense of vampirism as repressed sexuality. This wasn't a new thing at the time, but showing Mina and Lucy to already be sexually curious Victorian woman, and having the vampirism unleash that, was very fascinating (although Ryder can't pull off insatiable woman like Frost). 

 

My favorite bit, from both the book and the movie, is the tension over science versus superstition. Showing Dracula and Mina at the movie house is a nice bit of period piece authenticity but it also shows how the world has moved past Dracula. Seward and Van Helsing start off as possible voices of logic and reason in opposition to Dracula, but eventually embrace another kind of superstition, religion. This is unfortunate, as it seems in direct opposition to Van Helsing's earlier rational mind.

 

Also, Hopkins does this weird leg humping thing at one point in the movie that he also does in Titus. What's up, Hopkins?

"She is the devil's concubiiiine!!! Hey HEY!"

 

I love this movie like I love a beautiful but stupid cat that pisses on things but does weird and hilarious shit.

 

If you didn't understand a word of English but caught it on HD cable randomly late one night, you'd be all like "Okay, THIS IS AWESOME."

 

Production design/costume design = amazing. Music = perfect. Waits = in the right mood I'd raise a glass to this performance as the greatest ever.

 

Keanu actually adds to the entertainment factor, for me. Of course he's terrible in it. Again, get me in the right mood and I just laugh at everything he says.

 

And you have fucking Withnail himself playing scenes with Waits.

 

The movie is a fever dream, unlike anything else Coppola has done. It's his gigantic tribute to fantasy film.

 

Anyway, wasn't it only called Bram Stoker's Dracula because Universal claimed the rights to plain old Dracula as a title? As it is, the script began life as Dracula: The Untold Story, and Coppola supposedly wanted to call it D. at one point.

 

There's been some debate, too, over whether Stoker really did use the historical Vlad the Impaler as inspiration for Dracula. I think it was a Video Watchdog article that made a pretty good case that it's a myth that's been very good for tourism in Romania over the years. The movie, though, damn sure takes off from the legend of Vlad's wife throwing herself off a tower (though not because she thought Vlad was dead). I think the same article also pointed out that aside from the two non-Bellucci Dracula-bride actresses, both of whom are actual Romanians, everyone in the movie speaks laughably shit Romanian.

 

I've held off on the Blu-ray (I'm satisfied with my Superbit). The much darker Blu-ray screenshots scared me off. And something completely nerdy: On the Blu-ray, the subtitles in the prologue have been replaced by a generic-looking subtitle font, instead of the fancier font in all other versions. I would miss that font.

 

 I have no problem with Reeves in BS's Dracula. I've read the book, and Harker is a boring one dimensional character.

That would be fine if boring and one dimensional was what Reeves was going for. Do I think his performance is the abomination that people have been calling it for years? No, he's just miscast (severely), and since he was a friend of Ryder's and she was the one who asked Coppola to come on board to direct, it's just one of those things. 

 

Reeves' performance is so clumsy on a technical level that it obscures the fact that he really is putting in work; but this was made back when he was young and perhaps not fully aware of his limitations. It's all about the accent, really.

It's not just the accent. I will state that this one of my all time favorite films, and I consider it to be a bloody brilliant masterpiece. From the in camera effects to the atmosphere to the performances, it's all just so wonderful. I could watch this movie once a month till the end of my life and never grow bored

With that said, Keanu is a near fatal flaw, and does great harm to any scene in which he appears

Look, I'm a pretty big Keanu apologist, and when well cast, I think he can bring a special quality that can benefit certain roles enormously

In this one though, he was painfully out of his depth. His accent doesn't bother me, his greatest offense against the film is that he seems lost and unconvincing. When Gary Oldman's shadow is doing some seriously sinister, spooky shit upon his arrival at Castle Dracula, Reeves only seems baffled. He plays it so aloof one must wonder if his Harker is brain damaged. Oldman threatens him outright, and Reeves seems more bewildered than frightened.

 

Consider this exchange. Reeves' delivery is just painful, in fact, it's laughable, and it has nothing to do with the accent:

 

 

 

There is no sense, outside of his plodding narration, of a dawning realization that he's found himself in the midst of unimaginable horror. Reeves simply cannot sell Harker's internal journey and or dread at the revelation of Dracula's identity

When he gets back to London, his inability to emote or convey Harker's evolution as a character is even more pronounced. I get that he's supposed to be a fairly pathetic figure, and that's why we don't feel too sorry for him when he's made a cuckold by Dracula.. but Keanu's character isn't weak, it's his screen presence. Witness his laughable acting in the scene where he spots Drac from the carriage upon his return to London. It just doesn't work on any level

Accents are one thing, but Reeves is simply terrible in FFC's BS's D, and when the rest of the cast is doing career best work all around him, it makes the scenes in which he plays a central role horribly off balanced, often to the degree it damages the mood the film is trying to go for

 

 

Anyway, I agree with anyone who states film is basically a masterpiece, and while I resent how Reeves' shoddy work mucks up it's legacy, I still am unafraid to declare myself a life long fan. As far as I'm concerned, it's the definitive screen DRACULA

 

PS One of my favorite memories stored in my grey matter is watching this with a special friend of mine in fall 2003, so this movie has sentimental value for me as well

Edited by Princess Kate - 11/1/11 at 11:09am

I gotta say, I agree with Kate on this one. It isn't the accent, it's Keanu's baffled performance that really sinks it. Also like Kate, it doesn't ruin the movie for me. Somehow.