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Page 1 of 4 I am often (unfairly, I feel) saddled with the label “negative”. I am just a man with strong opinions. I try my very best to like every movie I watch, but sometimes the movie doesn’t show me the same courtesy. So it was with a heavy heart that Angela laid out her Fortnight of Fangs agenda to me. Mainly the part about me writing a column on vampire movies. You see, vampires are my least favorite cinematic monsters. They have been co-opted by the corseted goth girl set, the Anne Rice-reading, rave-going, pleather-wearing banes of my existence. Bram Stoker would roll over in his grave if he could see how his hell spawn stregoica blood-sucker has been dressed up in ruffles and made into a ladies’ man. I mean, in his novel Dracula, the Count feeds his three wives babies. And when one mother claws at the castle door, bewailing the fate of her progeny, what does the glammer-man do? With a wave of his hand, he calls forth his wolf children to tear her into pieces before Jonathan Harker’s horrified eyes. And so I am incapable of stomaching tripe like Interview with the Vampire. Just. In. Cape. Ah. Bull.
One favor Angela did do for me, though, was to get into a little bit of the mythology of vampires, some of their history in different cultures throughout the ages, which saves me the bother. For the extent of this article, we are going to deal strictly from Dracula to the present. The first stop on that agenda is to point out that Stoker did not base his character on Vlad Tepes. He already had his plot outlined before he stumbled upon the despot during his research, and simply retro-fitted his story to jibe with the stories of the blood-thirsty tyrant. The second thing we need to go over is that there has, as yet, never been a decent movie made from the book. Nosferatu was changed heavily, due to its completely illegal nature. Stoker’s estate never okayed it, and in fact successfully sued the tits off of F. Murnau. Which is just as well, since other than Max Shreck looking supremely creepy as Count Orlock, it is a pretty ridiculous film. Next comes Tod Browning’s 1932 Dracula, which was officially sanctioned, but actually based on the play that was based on the book. That second-cousin status accounts for the huge departures from the novel. 1979’s Frank Langella-starring Dracula was also based on the play, and indeed seems more like a remake of Browning’s film than anything else. It is a beautifully shot film, and features the strong work we’ve come to expect from Donald Pleasance, but ultimately it can’t get out of its own way. When Dracula gets pissed at Renfield and transmogrifies into a bat, I thought I was watching an episode of The Munsters. Grandpa was a more convincing menace. And not even get me started on the Christopher Lee stuff. He portrayed the character I think more than 20 times, and it is a huge chunk of time wasted. I know it is heresy, but I just can’t get behind the Hammer stuff. Yes, it is decently campy and cheesy, but they were just a mill churning out weakly-scripted excuses to inject tiny-tittied byrds and pseudo-disco soundtracks into the horror scene.Case in point: The Satanic Rites of Dracula. I’ll pass. (although it does feature an impossibly young Joanna Lumley – Patsy from AbFab). Coppola’s Dracula is possibly the most ridiculous of all. It claims to be faithful to the book, but puts in just as much romance as the average Lifetime Channel movie, including some ludicrous premise of Dracula’s plight being the result of having a broken heart. What?! Anthony Hopkins is credible as Van Helsing, but that is hardly reason enough to let your ass go numb for 6-hours, or however long it is.
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