‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you.’
Watching this on a Saturday afternoon, I drifted off into a nap where I dreamed that I was driving my car while I was asleep. After I woke up, confused and groggy, I realised that I never watched this film the whole way through without falling asleep at some point. There were large sections of it that I didn’t remember, especially towards the end.
Though it's been done hundreds of time, adapting Bram Stoker’s novel can’t be easy. It’s epistolary, and told from the point of view multiple narrators. If you haven’t read it, you really should. If you haven’t watched this film...I’m not sure that you should.
The plot very basically is that Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to Transylvania to help his new client Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) to close the sale on a London property after the previous solicitor Renfield (Tom Waites) is sectioned by Dr Seward (Richard E Grant). Renfield eats flies so that sort of makes sense.
Meanwhile, Jonathon’s fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder) waits at home and hangs out with her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) who is trying to work out which one of three horny men she’ll marry.
Dracula sees a photo of Mina and believes that she’s the reincarnation of his lost love Elisabeta. He traps Jonathon in his castle with three sexy horny sex vampires and he heads to London to find Mina. On his trail is Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Dracula goes for horny Lucy first of all, turning her into one of his horny sex vampires.
Mina forgets she’s married to Jonathon and gets horny for Dracula, and then there’s a battle for her soul and for Dracula to be reunited with Elisabeta in the great hereafter. The end.
It’s really long, clocking in and 2 hours 16 minutes. It’s relentlessly horny. Everyone wants to fuck, all the time, particularly Lucy who spends most of her screentime with one boob hanging out. Everyone knows Keanu Reeves’ English accent is awful, but I rarely hear mentioned that Winona Ryder’s isn’t that great either. (Tom Waites does a great job though.)
The costume design is great, especially for Dracula, who gets to wear a shimmery gold cloak that looks like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting, and a red silk Chinese dressing gown with a long train and wing-like sleeves. There’s one outfit where he looks like Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. Sadie Frost gets to wear a huge shimmery silvery-white dress with a vast lace ruff and Mina’s final scene dress is beautiful.
The special affects are really impressive, and some of the scene transitions are really clever.
This is an auteur film, though, and it shows. Apparently it had a 40 million dollar budget, and terrible things happen when you give a big-driven director that much money to make a film (see Megalopolis, also directed by FGC, which was so fucking bad I turned it off half way through).
It’s actually kind of boring, which is probably why I keep falling asleep. It's too long and there's too much of Lucy's love interests who, apart from Dr. Seward, don't really add anything. Keanu Reeves is beautiful, though, and apparently he tried really, really hard with the accent.
Content warning: boobs, boobs, some boobs, a tit, boobs, eating spiders
Final thoughts: I have crossed oceans of time watching this film
