I listened to only words of praise for Curtis's adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", and now that I finally saw it I'm totally confused. This film is bad in almost every aspect. The fact that it is one of the versions most faithful to the original material is not by itself sufficient. Moreover, for someone who has watched every version of Dracula that he encountered, this is a big disadvantage, because when you watch the same story for countless times, it becomes painfully boring. This film is a classic version of Dracula that does not bring even a bit of originality, so in the sense of the story itself, it can be interesting only to those who encounter Dracula for the first time. But a movie is not just a story, and there are countless ways it can capture the viewer. This one didn't use any of them. Apart from Jack Palance, who brings us a different, unusual but very striking version of the Count, the performances of other actors are mediocre and uninteresting. Visually, the movie has no major flaws, but there's nothing to praise either. I did not like the directing, the pace is too slow, and the general atmosphere is plain boring. It is not scary, nor tense, nor dramatic, and there are not even traces of humor to be found. The only thing that broke the boredom are incredibly stupid mistakes in the film, which are so obvious that the only reasonable explanation for their presence is that the makers simply didn't care at all to put some effort in it. The film places the Bulgarian city of Varna and Romanian Transylvania in Hungary, and when, at the beginning of the film, Jonathan arrives at the Dracula's castle in Transylvania, Hungary, Hungarians speak Russian. There are more stupid mistakes that you can easily notice, if you decide to waste your time on this movie, but there's no need to list them, because this alone is enough to shut down the movie. Although it has no influence on the story itself, it represents amateurism, lack of education and laziness of the creators, on the basis of which I assumed that other aspects of the film will be at a low level too. And I was right.
4/10
4/10