I Have Seen Three Dracula Movies

Last night I saw Dracula: A Love Tale (the French one, not to be confused with the American one), and I realized partway through the screening that I've now seen three Dracula movies that run across the spectrum of quality. Now, I've never read Dracula (I bounced off it when I tried to read it on my Nintendo DS) or seen the more famous Francis Ford Coppola movie (though I've heard Dracula: A Love Tale swapped a lot of spit with it, and cursory Wikipedia look seems to confirm that). That said, I'm going to make this your problem because the internet is, if nothing else, a fantastic place to dump your uninformed opinions. So, in order from worst to best viewing experience, let me present you with my Draculas Three.

Dracula Untold

Do y'all remember the Dark Universe? When Universal wanted to get some of that sweet sweet MCU cash that was sloshing around and made The Mummy (2017), a movie stuffed to the gills with exposition as they tried their damnedest to set the whole thing up in one go, and then it was all immediately canned? What if I told you...that was not the true beginning to the Dark Universe?

They weren't even in the same room for this photo

Dracula Untold is a 2014 movie written by the brain geniuses behind Gods of Egypt, The Last Witch Hunter, Morbius, and Madam Web, and it somehow manages to be the worst of them. The films suffers from a poor concept (attempting to turn Dracula into a tragic antihero), failed attempts to tie into a failed cinematic universe which would later reject it, poor lighting, and a weird undercurrent of Islamophobia (because, of course, Dracula is Vlad II fighting off the Turks, and his own wartime conduct is phrased as grim but necessary). I couldn't even finish this one. Not even Charles Dance as the evil older vampire could save this one for me. Don't watch this one.

Dracula: A Love Tale

At it's best, Dracula: A Love Tale reminds me of Baz Luhrman's Elvis: an array of dizzying, occasionally super horny, and weird choices against a backdrop of gorgeous cinematography. I wish I could just spend these paragraphs telling you about the sex perfume dance montage, Dracula's cool helmet that looks like a dragon, the pyramid of nuns, or the suicide attempt montage. There are moments where there's a great sense of energy, of things happening immediately one after the other. But for every moment like that there's Dracula's ten-minute monologue about his backstory, or everyone farting around at a carnival, and that kinda kills the pacing of it.

On top of all of that, this movie leans hard into "Mina is a reincarnation of Dracula's dead wife" and tries to make it into a love triangle of sorts, but it isn't, not really. It's the story of one woman who doesn't want to romance a guy until she's magicked into remembering that she did, and there just isn't any chemistry, just people incapable of recognizing a man constructed entirely out of red flags.

He looks like a cross between Tommy Wiseau and Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka

The highlight of the film is probably Matilda de Angelis as a vampire who is definitely responsible for at least a few audience members' sexual awakening; she's just so into draining the life out of you, you know?

This is a half-decent "Bad Movie Night" recommend, but you'd be better off with something lighter and tighter.

Last Voyage of the Demeter

I'm gonna show my ass here and say I actually like this movie. It's not good, but I enjoyed watching it a lot. For one thing, it's structured as a pretty bog-standard creature feature, taking a single chapter from the original book and letting us watch as the crew gets picked off one by one. I don't really have as much to say on this one because it's just kinda...fine. The cast all does a passable job, and its fun watching them collectively try to figure out what a vampire is.

Plus it has a boat! I love when movies have boats (Pirates of the Caribbean post coming eventually I promise), and Last Voyage of the Demeter has a really good boat that you spend basically the entire movie on. 

Are Vampires as giant bats overdone? Sure, but I love it anyways.

The DVD is like five bucks on Amazon, and I can easily recommend it at that price. 

Bonus Round: Morbius

I love Morbius so much. It's the perfect bad movie. Madame Web has a lot of good moments too, and sure the entire Sony Universe was doomed to be creatively bankrupt from the get-go, but Morbius is fantastic. You never know where you're going in this movie. 

I never cared for the "Morbing Time" meme, mostly because I feel like we as a society cannot make up dumb stuff as well as this movie can. "Morbing Time?" How about "Morbius wins by doing a Kamehameha?" How about "A guy tries to attract a cat by shaking its litter box?" How about "We tried to have a Joker Stairs moment and completely fucked it up?" 

Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are American heroes

This movie is great, and I highly encourage all of you to join me in becoming fellow Morbheads. My only regret is that you won't have the experience I did watching it in the theater, where an employee came in at the end, and was like "Yeah that post-credits scene didn't make any sense at all."