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4. Dracula (1979), dir. John Badham
Monday, 16 February 2015 22:35As mentioned previously on these pages, I have a Horror Bible, which I bought when I was about 11 or 12 years old. In it is a page which looks like this:
I had seen Christopher Lee as Dracula already when I bought the book, of course, and caught up with Bela Lugosi about ten or fifteen years later. But the other two have only become easily available to me now that the Golden Age of Amazon, Lovefilm, YouTube et al. has dawned. I saw and reviewed Louis Jourdan's Count Dracula in October (and am of course very sorry indeed that we lost Louis himself just this weekend). So Langella's performance was the last of the iconic Draculas which I still needed to catch up with. It hardly needs saying that I watched it with fellow horror aficionado![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ms_siobhan, but for once this time I actually have a live witness to her Dracula-enabling tendencies: rosamicula will testify that while discussing plans for our next film session in front of her, I asked what we should watch, and ms_siobhan gleefully replied "Dracula!" So it's totally not my fault.
Alas for us, though, Langella's Dracula is most definitely the weakest of the four. That's not to say it is an utter waste of time. ( Visually, it was stunning )
I quite liked ( the broad strokes of how the story was approached, too )
Meanwhile, on the downside, no setting or scenery could possibly have compensated for the fact that ( Langella himself just was not Dracula )
And then there is the stuff that just leave you asking - ( WTF? Like the vampire-hunting horse, for example. )
Other points to note include Donald Pleasance as Dr. Seward and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing, but both of them unfortunately pretty much dialling it in. Also, Unexpected Sylvester McCoy as an unconvincing and inept guard in Seward's asylum. Langella's Dracula, like Jourdan's two years earlier, dutifully scaled the walls of the asylum face-down like a lizard - though he could hardly not have done after such a recent example. And a climactic chase sequence involving Dracula and Lucy (or was it Mina?) heading for the coast to escape their pursuers by ship borrowed heavily from a similar chase at the end of Hammer's Dracula: Prince of Darkness, complete with visuals of a cloth-covered wagon containing a coffin bouncing up and down with the ruts in the road.
But now that I have seen this, noted down its key features, and (above all) ticked it off in my Horror Bible, I do not think I am likely to revisit it again.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
I had seen Christopher Lee as Dracula already when I bought the book, of course, and caught up with Bela Lugosi about ten or fifteen years later. But the other two have only become easily available to me now that the Golden Age of Amazon, Lovefilm, YouTube et al. has dawned. I saw and reviewed Louis Jourdan's Count Dracula in October (and am of course very sorry indeed that we lost Louis himself just this weekend). So Langella's performance was the last of the iconic Draculas which I still needed to catch up with. It hardly needs saying that I watched it with fellow horror aficionado
ms_siobhan, but for once this time I actually have a live witness to her Dracula-enabling tendencies: rosamicula will testify that while discussing plans for our next film session in front of her, I asked what we should watch, and ms_siobhan gleefully replied "Dracula!" So it's totally not my fault.Alas for us, though, Langella's Dracula is most definitely the weakest of the four. That's not to say it is an utter waste of time. ( Visually, it was stunning )
I quite liked ( the broad strokes of how the story was approached, too )
Meanwhile, on the downside, no setting or scenery could possibly have compensated for the fact that ( Langella himself just was not Dracula )
And then there is the stuff that just leave you asking - ( WTF? Like the vampire-hunting horse, for example. )
Other points to note include Donald Pleasance as Dr. Seward and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing, but both of them unfortunately pretty much dialling it in. Also, Unexpected Sylvester McCoy as an unconvincing and inept guard in Seward's asylum. Langella's Dracula, like Jourdan's two years earlier, dutifully scaled the walls of the asylum face-down like a lizard - though he could hardly not have done after such a recent example. And a climactic chase sequence involving Dracula and Lucy (or was it Mina?) heading for the coast to escape their pursuers by ship borrowed heavily from a similar chase at the end of Hammer's Dracula: Prince of Darkness, complete with visuals of a cloth-covered wagon containing a coffin bouncing up and down with the ruts in the road.
But now that I have seen this, noted down its key features, and (above all) ticked it off in my Horror Bible, I do not think I am likely to revisit it again.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
