Cult Classic Movie Review: Horror of Dracula

In honor of the late Christopher Lee, whose June 7 death was reported yesterday, I took a first look at the first of his series of iconic career-defining roles as Dracula. Lee is best known to modern audiences as the wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies or as the Sith Lord Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. But in the 50s and 60s, he starred in many of Hammer Films’ British horror films.

His first turn as the vampire was in Dracula, which was re-titled Horror of Dracula in the United States to avoid confusion with the Tod Browning-directed version from 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. The Hammer Films series was the second big iteration of attempts to bring Bram Stoker’s novel to the screen. Universal had made the Lugosi film and a few follow-ups, but Lee became a new generation’s face of Count Dracula for several years. Since the late 70s pop culture has been inundated with vampire stories ranging from the grotesqueries of John Carpenter and Stephen King to the comedy of Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey and then finally landing at teenage soap opera thanks to Stephanie Meyer by way of Anne Rice.

Only Lovers Left Alive Movie Review

Make no mistake about it, when Jim Jarmusch makes a vampire movie, he’s not jumping on the popularity bandwagon behind “True Blood” and the Twilight series. Those pieces of pop culture are so far outside the realm of what Jarmusch is known for that if he even gave them a second thought while he was writing and developing Only Lovers Left Alive, it was to check in on the ways his movie would be a hipper, cooler, and more loath response to soap opera lust.

Jarmusch is, if nothing else, eternally cool and hip. This is true even though his greatest audience, the film buffs who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, have now reached middle age and probably don’t have much time for indie cinema anymore. Because to watch a vampire movie made by this craftsman whose signature style is contemplation, reservation, and quietude followed by the inevitably dry offhand remark is to see the coolest damn vampires the movies have ever given us.

Dark Shadows Movie Review

I’ll say off the bat that I was primed to severely dislike Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s updating of the 1960s daytime soap opera about a gothic manor in Maine with strange supernatural occurrences. I have been less than enthusiastic – to put it diplomatically – about most of Burton’s work in the last ten years. When I think back on his career as a director, what I’ve enjoyed most are his films that are straight comedies. He has a real knack for the bizarrely funny and whimsically macabre. I think of Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks!, and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as his most enjoyable features. Recent films like Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland have been simply odd, overblown and bloated. Then there was the matter of the advertising for Dark Shadows, which I thought made it look like a 1970s kitsch piece featuring yet another in a long and increasingly exhaustive series of offbeat Johnny Depp performances (his eighth in collaboration with Burton). Imagine my immense surprise to find a lighthearted homage to a TV series that Burton and Depp both claim to have loved as children.

The Lost Boys Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Before Anne Rice’s gothic horror novel based on young vampires was immortalized in a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and long before pre-adolescents became obsessed with the Twilight series of books and films, there was The Lost Boys, one of the first films to deal with teenaged vampires in a dramatic way. Once Bitten and Fright Night were both comedies released two years earlier. Director Joel Schumacher made The Lost Boys in the middle of a stint of making several films focused on young people. I consider it his best period as a director.

Spanish Dracula Movie Review

Carlos Villarías uses this expression about 50 times throughout the film.

First published at Mostly Movies on 29 November 2010

It was a common practice in the early sound era for Hollywood studios to produce a second, nearly identical, version of a film in a foreign language. They were produced in Spanish, French and German most often and very few of the foreign language versions survive to this day. One of the most famous that does survive is the Spanish language version of the 1931 Tod Browning Dracula.

George Melford served as director, as was his station at Universal pictures during that period. He directed Spanish language versions of several films. According to IMDb, he neither spoke nor understood the language, but Wikipedia tells me he got the job specifically because of his knowledge of Spanish. Oh what a perfect example of how unreliable the Internet is. Ten years before Drácula he directed Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, which survives as one of the classics of silent cinema.

Classic Movie Review: Tod Browning's Dracula

What’s most striking about Tod Browning’s Dracula is how, despite being almost comically stylized by modern standards, you can still see its profound influence on horror films through the decades straight up to the present. The camera and lighting techniques were mostly still in their infancy in 1931, and (apart from Fritz Lang’s M from that same year) film makers had yet to learn how to effectively incorporate synchronized sound in a way that augments the action, but most films of the genre that have followed owe some bit of credit to Browning. That said, Dracula itself, the first official film version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, exhibits the influence of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, the 1922 German silent film that was an unsanctioned adaptation of the famous vampire story.