Bram Stoker's Dracula. - movie reviews

Call it The Law of Pyrotechnics as Applied to Cinema. At every good fireworks display I've attended, the masters of sparklers and rockets have been careful to keep their launches decidedly uneven in beauty and volume. A heaven-storming explosion is followed by a mere crack and trickle of fire, that trickle by a fair amount of thunder, and that thunder by another Jovian upburst. The result is an audience kept in a state of constant, pleasurable anticipation.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola shoots off one stunner after another. The camera races up and down the steps of castles and ships, scarlet scarves swirl in the wind, the Count turns not only into a bat but into a werewolf and a gargoyle, bodies fly through the air, blood geysers, Professor Von Helsing cries on like Rumpelstiltskin (frightful overacting by the great Anthony Hopkins), possessed women vomit torrents of blood (shades--scarlet shards instead of pea-green--of The Exorcist!!), heads are lopped off in close-up. The result isn't exactly tedium because it's sometimes fun to watch Uncle Frank's magic show. But one gets tired of him shouting "Presto!" every twenty seconds. If only he would calm down and simply tell the old story in a way that would convince us that he had once read the book as a boy and been thrilled by it. In Murnau's great Nosferatu, the discovery of Dracula crawling head-first down his sheer castle wall was an unsettling sight because it emerged out of an atmosphere of hushed, subdued foreboding. But the same sight in Coppola's film, though no less well-executed technically, is ineffective because it's just one more freak-show stunt following and preceding scores of other stunts.

There is no conviction in this movie, only gore and camp. And since every single shot announces its own expensiveness, the overall result is distasteful. Camp loses its playfulness when it costs this much.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Commonweal Foundation
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