The
COUNT YORGA movies are a scream; they actually unnerved me a bit when I was a kid. Robert Quarry is perfect for the part; he's got a wonderful presence and an old-world charm about him. Plus, he sports the best vampire fangs--including sharpened incisors--that ever appeared on screen to that point.
The 1978 BBC production of
DRACULA, starring Louis Jourdan, is easily the most faithful to the novel, but even it falls short in places. Why every producer of every Drac film has to change all the character names and relationships around mystifies me. Regardless, it's a fine adaptation, with very dark atmosphere and an effective, eerie muscial score. Jourdan is not the actor one would immediately think of as Dracula, but if you disregard the fact that he does not resemble the description in the novel, he's excellent in the role. Frank Finlay is the consummate Van Helsing; better, even, than Peter Cushing, who is otherwise my favorite (although my appreciation of the Hammer Drac films is minimal). The most glaring shortcoming is the actor who plays Quincy; he's a Brit playing a Texan and the accent is to send one into convulsions of laughter.
FRIGHT NIGHT is a heap of fun; it's got the right balance of comedy and thrills. Roddy McDowell is fabulous, and I really like Chris Sarandon as the vampire. I enjoy the sequel a lot, too, though not as much as the original.
For a really heavy-duty, killer vampire flick, try
NEAR DARK, starring Lance Hendrickson and Bill Paxton. The resolution is a bit too pat and far-fetched (even for a vampire movie), but the characters are way cool, especially Hendrickson. He's one of my favorite actors and this part was tailor-made for him.
DRACULA 2000 was pretty cool. Not a top-notch film by any stretch, but it gave a thoroughly interesting origin for the character and had some genuinely creepy moments. Plus some good laughs. Didn't particularly care for the noisy soundtrack.
And then there's...
BLACULA! What a hoot! This is a campy romp, about in the same league as
COUNT YORGA. It's another one that swipes the DS theme of the vampire having a lost love reincarnated in the present. Kinda fun, though.
Overall, I like the Dan Curtis
DRACULA with Jack Palance, although some of the elements of the novel that were excised (no doubt due to time and budget constraints) were all but unforgivable. Palance does a superb job, especially in recounting his role as a Transylvanian warrior prince. Castle Dracula, however, looks like an old Tudor home--not quite what one would expect to find in the middle of the Carpathians.
Christopher Lee did an almost unknown, low-budget version of "Dracula" that was filmed in Spain, which also begins very promisingly.
Yeah, it did open on a nice, creepy note, and Christopher Lee starts out well. But by the end of it, there's not much to differentiate it from the Hammer Dracs, where he's reduced to walking around looking menacing and hissing a lot. Both Dracula and Lee always deserved a lot better.
Sometimes I almost like Coppola's
DRACULA, and sometimes I want to throttle everyone involved in it. Gary Oldman is fabulous, especially when he's over the top as the old crone Drac. However, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing is a sad bit; Hopkins is one of my favorite actors, but he just didn't work in this part. Why he occasionally refers to Dracula as "Dracul"--in essence referring to Vlad's pappy--is inexplicable and distracting. And while I don't particularly dislike Keanu Reeves, as so many people I know do, he does go a long way in this movie toward justifying all the terrible things people say about him. The production has a neat theatrical quality about it, and I like a lot of the various styles of cinematography, but it ultimately looks like it was filmed on a big sound stage. The settings don't convey any sense of reality.
Hey... there's always
THE NIGHT STALKER! One of my faves....
