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.

From My Collection - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Movie Review

Eowyn tests Aragorn's fealty to his beloved in The Two Towers.

As much as I loved The Fellowship of the Ring is as disappointed as I was in The Two Towers. Except in its magnificent closing epic battle, it failed to inspire a sense of awe. Everything I admired about the first film was largely absent in the second. This includes the focused storytelling that had as its centerpiece a group of men on a quest. Now the fellowship was fractured, it felt like three different stories. And the toggling back and forth left me feeling impatient and restless. I don't know that there was any way for screenwriters Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh to get around that. It's a style of 'cutting' that works fine in the format of a novel, but for a three hour plus film it grows tedious.

Hugo Movie Review

This review is based on the 3D version of the film. As this is only the second film I’ve seen in the contemporary 3D style I don’t feel I’m familiar enough with its uses and implementations to 100% accurately judge whether it’s any good or not. However, I have taken the liberty of commenting on my reaction to the 3D as I believe it is the critic’s duty to report his response to a film as completely as possible.

When I read that Martin Scorsese was going to make his next film in 3D and it was also going to be an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s children’s picture novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, my first reaction was to be simply dumbfounded. Why would the director of so many dark and violent films that deeply explore the human condition venture into such new territory? And why would the man who still insists on using film stock, a man who supremely values film history, shoot in 3D? Surely this must have been some kind of total commercial sellout. Well, the final judgment is yet to be determined as it often takes years for the critical and audience response to render a final verdict on a piece of pop culture’s place in the canon, but after seeing it I can say it makes a lot more sense now that Scorsese was drawn to this particular story and this particular use of 3D technology to make Hugo.