It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Hammer tinkered with the story for budget reasons: they didn't have the means for a faithful adaptation. Christopher Lee desperately wanted to play the role in a faithful adaptation.
I haven't seen the series yet, but that is, in more general terms, my beef with many TV (mini) series. Writers often throw stuff in to stretch the length and number of episodes, usually to the detriment of the show. I don't mind a little "re-imagining" of a book, or even a broad expansion of it if you have the material for it, but I have seen too many series spin out of control with subplots that go nowhere, or a pacing that hits zero. After one or two episodes, I cannot go on anymore. That’s why I am a film guy first and foremost. Films paint on a different canvas, and scripts are forced to deliver something that fits it. TV series have the option of leaving things unresolved, for “next time” or “futures seasons”. Very few of them actually pull it off.
Dracula can be expanded on, no doubt. But from the sound of it, Gatiss and Mofatt didn't deliver, despite the show's rather high approval ratings.
I loved the series. It went to some surprising places and provides some really clever updates and twists on the Dracula lore.
Claus Bang is simply sensational as the count. It also has a splendid David Arnold score.
I had my third viewing a few weeks ago.
Do yourself a favour, @DarthDimi 😁
Sounds interesting, but I'd rather have a proper, faithful adaptation of the novel. Which has never been done.
I hope it's not. If nothing else, if it does work, it would be nice to have a proper treatment of a section of the novel that is too often glossed over. It has genuinely terrifying moments.
As Renfield, Nicholas Hoult is a bloodsoaked nebbish with layers of dopey sweetness. His performance has its own vitality, and he's utterly convincing as the meek servant with a core of decency who finally finds the gumption to stand up to his boss.
In some stretches the movie becomes a live-action Adult Swim cartoon, tackling an aburd premise with snarky dialogue and comedically over the top gore. But the craziness isn't sustained, and one has to put up with the conventional narrative and supporting characters: a gangster plot with mafiosos and a good cop played by Awkwafina, whose character is little more than attitude and a backstory. There's a conflict between the anarchic energy of Cage's Dracula and the deadening modern-movie tropes that even comedic filmmakers feel the mistaken need for.
The movie honors its selling point of Nicholas Cage as Dracula in the modern world but doesn't exploit it to the hilt. It peaks about three quarters through. And though it pokes some fun at the cliches of modern therapy culture (Renfield announces he's in a co-dependent relationship) it ends up affirming them. American comedies may be edgy but they're rarely subversive.
https://collider.com/dark-universe-universal-what-happened/
The worst thing is that it could work. I mean the idea of a shared "horrorverse" with monsters interrelated could work. But they need to get their stuff straight, both conceptually and from a marketing/branding point of view. What are the most famous monsters of Universal? Dracula and the Monster of Frankenstein. How are they best known in the public eye? The way Lugosi and Karloff portrayed them. So adapt/remake the books/origin al movies first and go from there. First make standalone movies that actually stand on their own, as old fashioned horror flicks, heavy on gothic tropes and aesthetic. Add sequel hooks and I think you have something.
They were trying to ape Marvel too much I think. Supernatural and horror stories work on a different level than sci-fi, let alone superhero movies: you must make people believe that the world they know is not all it seems. Thats what creates the unease. In a world where vampires exist, it's not much of a stretch that werewolves, mummies and reanimated corpses do too. But you need to pace it and keep it subtle. Otherwise you banalise the whole thing.
https://www.theverge.com/23827127/the-last-voyage-of-the-demeter-review
It's only one review, but I'm not surprised.
Also, I think with Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and other iconic characters, the name recognition is used to sell a project regardless of quality. They use the name as branding, but little else.
I myself have worked on a fanfic about Dracula becoming vampire at Scholomance. A part of his background that is canonical, but never used (as far as I know) in adaptations. Coppola went for some cheesy love story instead, Dracula 2000 made him Judas (I mean seriously?), Marvel comics got him bitten by a vampire Gypsie and so on, but Scholomance is nowhere to be found. In Stoker's novel, it establishes Dracula as a quasi Antichrist.
I love Dracula's Guest, too. There's a great sense of 'otherness' all through it - at first merely by Harker being a Victorian English bloke in a foreign country and culture, the 'superstition' about Walpurgis Night, suicides at crossroads, the rumours of an old village that had been deserted when the dead had been found as if alive in their graves, etc, but also physically 'other' - when he leaves the safety of the coach the main road's like a boundary and once he's off it and walking down the disused road into deserted countryside, the only person for miles around, it's increasingly obvious that he's left the 'normal' rational world behind. I'd say that sets up a potentially great film.
There's so much stuff in it that would really work visually, too - the tall thin man seen at a distance on the hill who disappears as the horses bolt, the weather becoming more extreme the further he goes, finding the deserted village, the snowstorm, the moonlight revealing that the stand of yew trees (symbolic of eternal life!) he's sheltered in is in the old cemetery - the same one where the dead had been found as if alive in their graves centuries earlier. And it's Walpurgis Night, when the dead walk... The great tomb driven through with an iron spike, 'The dead travel fast', Countess Dolingen lying inside as if sleeping, the lightning strike, her screams, the howling of wolves in the storm and the 'vague, white, moving mass' all around as the graves open and they close in on him through the hail...then the appearance of the 'wolf...yet not a wolf' that turns out to have protected him until he's rescued. I really do think there's a minor classic in all of that.
Off the top of my head, seeing as Harker wasn't mentioned by name in the story, you could even not call it 'Dracula's Guest' and not reveal Harker's name until the end when he got back to the hotel and was given the telegram. Bit of a stunt reveal, but it'd probably work. And it'd be a damn sight better than having Dracula be Judas, eh!