Dracula

Being a huge fan of the book and countless other screen adaptations, especially Hammer's fine back catalogue, I looked forward to this with eager anticipation.

Although I found the twists in the plot to be really exciting and a breath of fresh air, I personally found that the hammy acting spoiled it and thought that Mina and Lucy were just plain awful. Not convincing whatsoever.

The creepy Warren gave me some hope as Dracula, although he didn't have presence of character enough to pull it off. I guess not too many actors do! I can only think of Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman who have pulled it off.

David Suchet played a fantastic van Helsing, however and for me, was the star of an otherwise disappointing adaptation.

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made the definitive version of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", with his stylish "Bram Stoker Dracula". Coppola's work and F.W. Murnau's masterpiece "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" are the best adaptation of the foregoing novel. I am a fan of vampire movies and the Hammer productions with the character Dracula performed by Christopher Lee are part of my youth.

"Dracula" (2006) is a stylish version made for television, with a great cast and magnificent cinematography that are wasted in a poorly written screenplay that introduces awful modifications to the original romance. This version is decent but absolutely unnecessary; entertains, but also disappoints the fans of the romance. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Dracula"

My partner and I are avid fans of the vampire genre and had eagerly anticipated the airing of this production. We sat down to watch it hoping for the best and that Auntie Beeb would not let us down and we found ourselves sadly disappointed.

It wasn't so much the deviation from the plot of the book that did it - pretty much every Dracula production does that to a certain degree and that is half of what makes these things fun to watch. It was more perhaps the casting, weak characterisation and the fact that most of the action seemed to be crammed into the final 15 minutes that did it. Mina Murray was almost offensively miscast in my opinion and Marc Warren, of whom I am normally a fan, didn't have the charisma or presence to pull off the strong character that is Dracula.

On a plus side, the costumes and sets were excellent, as they tend to be in most BBC period productions and there were some interesting themes, such as the blackening of Dracula's fingernails which perhaps hinted at the corruption that lies in the cursed character. Other than that the rewrite was a weak and disappointing production and doesn't even hold a candle to past efforts by Hammer or indeed Francis Ford Coppola.

I am a huge fan of vampire movies ever since I have seen Bram Stokers Dracula (directed by Francis Ford Coppola). And this has been around 12 years ago. There are very few vampire movies that come close to the masterpiece of Francis Ford Coppola. And this movie sadly stays far away. It started quite promising, but this movie has a countless amount of flaws.

The story: The variation of the original story isn't so bad, if it would just be a bit more „spectacular". The story simplifies the main-theme and adds some new interesting ideas. Some of those ideas are great, others seem too modern or simply don't fit.

The action: Probably the worst I have seen in a long time. Every time action actually happened, there was a cut in less than a second. - Probably to hide how cheap it was done? The directing was very bad throughout the whole movie. You have been able to see that the best during the action scenes.

Actors and characters: Mostly I found them awful. Characters have been boring, and actors plain bad. There have only been two exceptions. Holmwood (Dan Stevens) and Lucy (Sophia Myles).. those two seemed the only ones that have actually been given a character at all.

Atmosphere: Music was decent, but nothing special. The camera showed very "warm" colors. Similar to cheesy women-dramas in the 18th century. I didn't really like it. Everything looked artificial. Overall the atmosphere was decent, but could have been much better.

4 points because I had fun watching the movie. (I am not actually sure why.)

Was really rather looking forward to this, but was very disappointed by the finished product. It simply was so far removed from Stoker's tale that it could hardly count itself as an adaptation of the book. Not a single line of dialogue from Stoker's text was used; none of the characters were presented as they are on the page (Van Helsing a hermit living in a cellar!), and what book did the Satanist Singleton step out of? It was neither scary, nor sexy. Marc Warren did an interesting Klaus Kinski impersonation when he was old man Drac in the first act, but after his transformation into Robert Smith from The Cure, I lost interest. This is the 2nd time the BBC have filmed Dracula, and this one pales in comparison to their 1977 version starring Louis Jordan.