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When real estate agent Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown) comes to
Transylvania to fix a deal with Count Dracula (Jack Palance), little
does he know that that man is a vampire who is interested in moving to
London only because he wants to be near Lucy Wastenra (Fiona Lewis), an
acquaintance of Jonathan's who Dracula thinks to be the reincarnation of
his long lost love. So soon the vampire is off to England, while
Jonathan is left behind as a snack for Dracula's vampire brides. Back in
England, Lucy is soon falling sick, suffering from somnabulism &
blood-loss '(& you know hat that means), & her fiancé Arthur
Holmwood (Simon Ward) soon consults an expert, doctor Van Helsing (Nigel
Davenport), whose theories of Lucy being attacked by a vampire seem just
too outrageous to be true, but nevertheless, his advice of fighting the
illness with garlic & cruzifixes & standing constant guard over
her sleep seems to work. But Dracula is not a creature to be kept from a
lady that easily & he soon attacks the house witht he help of a wolf
he stole from the local zoo, & kidnaps & kills Lucy. But of
course, her being bitten by a vampire, she won't stay dead & soon
after her funeral comes back to bite Arthur in the neck, who is saved by
Van Helsing in the nick of time. Finally, Arthur agrees with the
doctor's outrageous theories & the 2 of them are off to the family
crypt to stake Lucy. Then the 2 men decide to track down Dracula via the
shipping records of his coffins, while Dracula, furious over the death
of his loved Lucy, decides to go after Lucy's mother (Pamela Brown)
& best friend Mina (Penelope Horner), who also happens to be
Jonathan Harker's fianée. In the nick of time Arthur & Van Helsing
manage to return to the 2 women & keep Dracula from killing them,
but he has already forced Mina to drink his blood & enslave her,
before fleeing the country. But our 2 heroes use Mina's state to their
advatnage, acutally foreseeing Dracula's moves through her &
arriving in his Transylvanian castle before him. After they kill off
Jonathan, who has turned into a vampire of course, the 2 expose Dracula
to the sun, robbing him of his supernatural powers, before staking him.
Having Jack Palance play the famous vampire might seen like an odd
choice, but he acutally handles the role quite well with an air of
otherworldly dignity. What does somewhat ruin the movie though is that
it in some scenes is sticking to the letters of the book it is based on
way too much while leaving out other large portions of it altogether,
thus deriving many scenes that sprang from the novel of any necessity,
instead only slowing down the proceedings & ruining any suspense.
Also, in the book it might have worked to obscure the fact that Dracula
is indeed a vampire from the reader for a while, but by the seventies
the basic plot of the novel has entered common knowledge so it seems
rather absurd to pretend Dracula would be anything but a vampire for the
first 25 minutes. A slow moving, uninspired, even stagey direction with
no sense for horror or suspense at all, & incedibly stilted,
soulless dialogues do not help the film, either.
Director Dan Curtis actually was the man who, with his successful
& long running (1966 - 1971) series Dark Shadows brought
horror & vampirism to American daytime television, & by the late
60's/early 70's he saw fit to make some classic horror novels into
tv-movies (besides Dracula also The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and
Mister Hyde (1968 - also with Palance) & Frankenstein
(1973) - these 2 only produced by Curtis).
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