One hint that we shouldn’t take Luc Besson’s new Dracula (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) too seriously? The shot of a road sign that seems to suggest that France and Romania share a border. Of course, by that point, we’ve already heard all the ridiculous accents and seen Count Dracula’s CGI gargoyle minions, so it’s not like we weren’t laughing already. Caleb Landry Jones stars as the umpteenth iteration of the classic bloodsucking monster-man, in the most notable Besson film since, uh, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets? Is that right? Guess it is. But the director behind The Professional, La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element still carries enough cred to warrant a look at his version of the vampire classic.
The Gist: Prince Vladislav (Jones) makes sweaty lusty love with his wife Elisabeta (Zoe Bleu) and they have pillow fights and nudie wrestling matches beneath silk sheets and oh my is it all so very erotique. But duty calls. He must armor up and go to war and, well, kill some Muslims. That’s how it worked in 1480. Vlad’s handlers peel him off his beloved and he still has sex stink and sweat on him as he pulls on his dragon-head helmet and rides out. But! What with one tragic thing and another tragic thing, Elisabeta is kidnapped by the enemy and perishes during Vlad’s attempt to rescue her.
Wracked with grief and rage, Vlad drops in on a Christian holy guy with a big dumb hat (is he the Pope or just a bishop or a mere priest? Does it matter?) and isn’t fond of the counsel. Prayer? That won’t bring her back! God is dead to Vlad now, you hear him, dead! Dead dead dead! Vlad impales the holy man on his own crucifix and now our guy is hereby cursed with eternal life, which, as the movie hereby dictates, comes with its own ill-defined set of rules, which sort of adhere to trad vamp flix, but sometimes don’t. Should we care that much? Probably not.
Subtitle: 400 YEARS LATER. Time flies when you’re having fun! In a Parisian asylum that’s apparently a quick flick of the film editor’s wrist from Romania, an unnamed priest (Christoph Waltz) drops by to check out a very rare captured vampire, Maria (Matilda De Angelis). His goal? Sniff out her sire, who probably ain’t Edward Cullen. Speaking of which, Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) leaves behind his lovely bride Mina (also Bleu, curious!) to address a matter of some real estate with a kind old prince living in an enormous creepy-ass castle in the Carpathian Mountains. He ding-dongs the doorbell and there’s Drac, looking like 75 miles of bad, pale, pasty, age-spotted road, his hair up in a brittle old jellyfish-bun hovering over his head, his teeth big and pointy, his eyes bleary and pinkish, his psychokinesis slamming doors shut. You just want to give him a big hug.
Harker, for reasons I cannot begin to surmise, doesn’t R-U-N-N-O-F-T, and as he tries to get to the matter at hand, he doesn’t notice the codger forking a mouse and squeezing its blood into his wine chalice for a little extra protein. Vlad monologues for a bit about his lost love Elisabeta, tears streaking his Emperor Palpatine cheeks. For the past four centuries, he’s quested to find his dear lost love in her reincarnated form, and at this point we’ve surely noticed that Bleu plays two characters here. Vladdy gonna cuck this bro, so he has the CGI gargoyles lock up Harker so he can jet to Paris (it’s only like a 10-minute walk) and find Mina. But first, Dracula stops by a nunnery to fuel up on blood so he can restore his good looks (like I said, the rules here are weird), because it’s hard to seduce a woman when you look like E.T. after he died but before he came back to life.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Maybe this should’ve been titled Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And then the American remake can be Tyler Perry’s Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Performance Worth Watching: Waltz was just the eccentric side character in Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?), just like he’s the eccentric side character here, and for a minute I thought he was also the eccentric side character in Nosferatu (David Eggers’ F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu?) until I remembered that was actually Willem Dafoe, who’s the all-time eccentric-side-character champion. Maybe the two actors should cage-match it if anyone decides a Wolf Man remake needs an eccentric side character. Anyhow, the real performance worth watching is Landry, who’s great as Dracula – campy, scary, strange and fully committed.
Sex And Skin: Nothing particularly graphic.
Our Take: Pardon the verbiage, but this Dracula is more than a little batshit, even though we never see the guy go airborne. Besson balances extremes in his take on the classic character, whether Vlad is expressing his centuries of deep melancholy (in his “normal” human state, Landry has a scar on his cheek resembling a streaking tear, which is a nice touch) or at dinner with Harker, pushing peas around on his plate like an impatient eight-year-old who just wants to be excused from the table to go play Roblox. He’s sad, he’s funny, he’s a self-described romantic, the lead in a movie originally titled Dracula: A Love Tale to underscore the dramatic arc.
Of course, ye olde Count is also a violent fella, as we see in a couple of rococo sequences, one in the aforementioned nunnery, the other at an elaborate costume ball-slash-orgy where his neck-chomping is barely noticed amidst the foppish reverie. One of Besson’s storytelling tweaks involves Drac’s use of a rare, powerful perfume that renders him irresistible (and the film oh so very French), all the better to lure in the ladies for a lusty nibble – a rather humorous pun to get the juices flowing, no?
Amusing as the film might be, Besson never quite unites the horror, comedy and pathos in a way that invokes the depth of emotion it arguably should, its throwback to dark-red-wine romanticism feeling a little too much like a faux-velvet cape from Spirit Halloween. The inevitable comparison is to Eggers’ Nosferatu, which blanketed us in atmospherics that drew together disparate tones under a monochromatic umbrella. Visually, Dracula is an ungainly amalgam of lushness, inside jokes (eye the homages to past vampire movies hanging on the walls of Dracula’s dining room) and chintzy CGI, primarily in the form of gargoyles who look lifted from a Ghostbusters garage sale.
This Dracula is as elaborate and ambitious as it is sloppy, mixing in weighty tragedy, gallows humor (see: Dracula’s numerous, fruitless suicide attempts), grand guignol horror, sweaty eroticism and deep silliness, all of which tend to rattle around like pebbles in a jar as the movie lumbers by, disinterested in details and logistics, well past the two-hour mark – it could stand to have its inseam taken in a little. Landry is enjoyably ghoulish, Waltz turns up to explain things in a stately manner (he teaches us the word “hematophagous,” which is fun), the Dracula design is far too reminiscent of Coppola’s and the heretical blasphemy is even more fun than the vocab lesson. Just pick and choose what works for you. It’s the horror-movie version of the Big Boy buffet, and no one will accuse it of being a chef’s meal of curated high art.
Our Call: This Dracula doesn’t always suck – or stink! Because of the perfume, you see. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
