“Let me pour you some vine.” Yes, Mr Tepes. Please do
It’s is very funny to me that the Box of Blood DVD boxset I bought, a collection of vampire movies, has this as its flagship Dracula adaptation. This is a kind of obscure Italian TV miniseries adaptation of Dracula which was cut down for the boxset. What results is some incredibly unintentionally funny scenes where either the sound mixing or the dubbing is slightly off (this was made with Italian, German and Turkish actors but was published with English) which, when combined with the accents and interesting dialogue, makes some scenes feel like a fever dream mobile ad for a Dracula gacha game. There’s also an incredibly funny cut on the disc where they clearly cut out a scene but failed to properly line up the remaining halves so the film just pauses for a second.
Like many early 2000s TV adaptations of classic literature, it decides to take a brash and loud approach to the source material which I cannot take seriously. I am not scared or intrigued, just laughing.
If the film wasn’t so dramatically juvenile I would have said that the sexuality of vampire media was captured well but it the 00s angst is such a turnoff.
I find these adaptations, like Steven Moffat’s Jekyll, that try to ‘modernise’ the literature a bit distasteful as their reverence makes Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece into a rich boy speeding through Romania in his red Porsche. The movie has little interest in recreating anything but the aestheticism of Dracula and adding little more than extra visual guff. All of the philosophical conversations are very heavy handed- to an amusing degree- which could have possibly done with less drama and more development.
Once the film abandons the modernity I started to like it much more but the use of pop music would occasionally break me out of these trances. The film takes a lot of inspiration from Nosferatu as far as I can tell; I was able to see similarities between this and Werner Herzog’s masterpiece so I assume there are more comparisons with other Nosferatus. For once, Count Tepes is actually heavily present like the novel which is certainly a mark up and one I will gladly welcome. Since this is an abridged version of a miniseries, I imagine much more time was spent characterising our vampiric friend since it had the time (Dracula’s Curse is over three and a half hours long!). Unfortunately it forgets to make Jonathan’s fear of Dracula seem real. He just decides to kill him which I can only guess is because some scenes had to be cut for time. Until this I thought I was getting some slow burn Jonathan and Dracula moments but no, the pacing is just a little buggered.
I will give the film this- it is incredibly dense. I have complaints but I also have positives which cannot all be mentioned. I would be interested in watching the full Dracula’s Curse miniseries to get the full experience out of this, although its whole “vampires want to take over the whole world” is very unsatisfyingly cliche. Until then, I don’t have much intention of revisiting this ‘cept out of novelty watches with exceptionally desperate friends. If you really need to watch some Dracula, watch Hammer’s adaptation instead.
