...as I can attest, being one of them; and this isn't it. It's more like a Hammer Films sequel, except that here we don't get tall, haughty Christopher Lee; we don't even get the short, gloating blond guy from Brides of Dracula. Instead we get a pasty, wormy little creep--Guppy from Bleak House--and when he pops up, I'm thinking, Maybe this is Renfield, not crazy yet? And then he introduces himself, and I'm like, "Dracula? Dracula??????" He of the uncanny power over women, the great Boyar, the incarnation of ultimate evil??? Gary Oldman was better than this. Francis Lederer was better than this. The guy with the cape hiding his face in Plan Nine from Outer Space was better than this. Then a little later, up pops a nutty old man--Ben Gunn from Treasure Island? No, this one is Dr. Van Helsing!!! And Arthur Holmwood wants Dracula to cure his syphilis, so he bankrolls Uncle Creepy's vampire church to import him.... What???
I can't imagine that I could ever have liked this story much, no matter what they'd done with it, but I didn't like it at all here, with the scattershot editing, the unsympathetic characters, the fake make-up, Mina looking like a goof...and worst of all was them passing it off as a Masterpiece Theatre "classic" when so little of the book was left. Why couldn't they have changed the character names and called it something else? Huge disappointment.
I can't imagine that I could ever have liked this story much, no matter what they'd done with it, but I didn't like it at all here, with the scattershot editing, the unsympathetic characters, the fake make-up, Mina looking like a goof...and worst of all was them passing it off as a Masterpiece Theatre "classic" when so little of the book was left. Why couldn't they have changed the character names and called it something else? Huge disappointment.