DRACULA 2001 15 Release: Next Friday. Running time: 99 mins. Quick plot: Drac’s back when some misguided thieves steal the count’s coffin in London and fly him to New Orleans. Van Helsing, now an antique dealer, soon has a stake in the proceedings.
ROSS: WHAT we have here is nearly a great Vampire movie. There are some cracking gags – including an atheist bloodsucker not fazed by crosses.
Brit actor Gerard Butler makes a charismatic count and Christopher Plummer is a great Van Helsing, keeping himself alive with a little help from leeches feeding off Dracula.
Then there’s Jennifer Esposito. She’s sex on legs as a crook who puts the vamp in vampire.
Mix in some neat additions to the Dracula legend and you should have the business. But ultimately it disappoints…mainly because the ‘mockney’ geezer hero Jonny Lee Miller has all the manliness of H from Steps.
Worse, Justine Waddell as Drac’s love interest is a po-faced turn-off. It’s also all over the place plot-wise, with vampires appearing and disappearing and Van Helsing taking a bloodbath far too early. Catch it if you’re a Drac addict, but it could have been a bleedin’ sight better.***
RONAY: THIS is Dracula for the MTV generation. It looks more like an American action movie than a horror flick about a bunch of weirdos with fangs.
But, of course, it is about a bunch of weirdos with fangs. Most of the cast are over-acting except for Jonny Lee Miller who’s constantly wide-eyed and gormless as if he’s not sure he’s in the right movie.
Justine Waddell is good at being worried, which is probably just as well because that’s all she gets to do except for one sex scene with Dracula which looks like it might be quite fun: at least the earth literally moves.
Needless to say, there are loads of blood all over the place, including a real toe-curling leech scene with an over-enthusiastic jumping sucker and a human’s eye.
Of course, all the women who’ve been changed into vampires become sex-crazed bloodsuckers, so it won’t come as any surprise when I tell you this extremely silly movie was written by a man. *
Copyright 2001 NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD