Dracula (1979)

This is an awesome movie and is up there as one of my absolute favorite Dracula adaptions. I mean c'mon, not only does it have Donald Pleasance and Laurence Olivier (and I love his delivery of the line..."there is work, wild work to be done.") and a fantastic performance by Frank Langella...but it's written by the guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai And the Willaims score is beautiful.

The DVD was a great pleasure too after having a copy I taped on vhs years and years ago. How much Badham bleached out all the color, almost to the point of B+W in some scenes, shows up beautifully on the DVD.

And I think Langella is great. I think he delivered so many of the classic lines very well and I used to watch this so much I guess I'm just taken with his inflections and performance.

And I got a kick out of an Angel epsiode where Angel said Langella's performance was one of the only vampire performances he believed.

When Van Helsing meets his daughter under the cemetary...well, that just freaked me the hell out.
This movie is a classic if only for that scene alone.

The soundtrack for this is to die (and rise again) for. I've used the main theme in some of Halloween shows. It really sets that scary/meloncholy mood. It's been many many years since I saw actually saw it however. Thanks for the reminder.

[sarcasm] My favourite part was the authentic Transylvanian accent Langella used. [/sarcasm]

I caught the bulk of this on IFC myself the other night, although I'd seen it a dozen or more times over the years. It's always been a personal favorite, although I tended to look at it as a guilty pleasure of sorts. I think the "general consensus" is that the story is so bastardized, romantic and "modern" (car chases, lots of blood, a fair amount of gore, the Jaws-style "destruction" finale) that most folks feel it to be something of an eye-roller.

I myself love just about everything about it: Olivier, Langella, Pleasance, Nelligan, the fan-fucking-tastic Williams score (when will Varese Sarabande ever put out a "complete score" CD for that one?), the atmosphere...and as others have mentioned, there are some solid scares / creep-outs throughout. ("...Pa-pa...Pa-pa...")

The DVD is out of print and as far back as a year and a half ago, Laurent Bouzereau was producing a special edition disc for Universal Home Video. What happened to that project, I have no idea, but I've heard nothing about its imminent release any time soon. (Universal being sold recently might have something to do with its delay / cancellation.)

And ya gotta love the 80's laser-light love scene / music video. Ya just gotta...

I agree.
While I'm not a big fan of Langella as The Lord of the Undead, the film does have some memorable & effective parts to it. THIS being numero uno.