Right, here's the pitch:
"Everyone loves Batman, yeah? Specifically everyone loves dark and moody Batman. Well, what if I told you that Universal is sitting on its very own dark and moody superhero? This guy makes Batman look like a wet wipe. He's super strong, he has super heightened senses, he can see in the dark....and this is the kicker....he can go one better than Batman.... because.... here is a man who can.... literally.... turn himself into a bat! He can fucking turn himself into a thousand bats if needed. Ladies and gentlemen I give you 'Dracula: The Dark Lord Rises'.
Fuck Marvel and their "shared universe". We're going to make "shared Universal" movies and you know how we're going to do it? We're going to take Dracula, and we're going to take Frankenstein, and we're going to take The Wolfman and we're going to take The Mummy and we're going to turn them ALL into superheroes. And we're going to make them appear in each others movies and we're going to make them fight each other and screw each other and team up to fight giant robots and giant lizards and we'll make tv spin-offs and comics and computer games and the future will be ours!.
You know when Dracula was last done right? 1992. Gary Oldman in 'Gary Oldman's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula' or whatever it was called. And you know that the only bit of that movie that was any good was the beginning, the bit with Vlad the Impaler. Yeah, well we're going to make that bit the whole fucking movie! The kids today weren't even born in 1992, they won't know. They deserve their own Dracula origin movie and we're going to give it to them.
Okay, here's another question for you? What does the the word 'Dracula' actually mean? It means Dragon. And you know what the most popular show on tv right now is? That's right 'Game Of Thrones' - the one with the dragons in it! And you know what we're going to do? We're going to make our Dracula in the style of Game Of Thrones; in fact we'll steal some of their actors. But it's going to be epic, like 'Lord Of The Rings' but with vampires. That's ten years of money rolling in right there.
Imagine Batman with a sword fighting insurmountable odds. That's right, that's our Dracula. Fuck '300' and all those pussies in loincloths. '300'? Fuck 'em. There's only one Dracula and he's fucking hardcore, he can take them all on....by himself. A whole movie of Dracula mowing down some fucking foreigner's armies. That's what people want.
But I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this is going to be expensive. There's too much location shooting, too many special effects and that all costs money. Well listen, we're not going to go to fucking New Zealand for this. We can do this on the cheap. We can go to Ireland. Miserable, dreary, bleak, drizzling, bog filled Ireland. It will make it look authentic. As for the special effects - I know this kid who can do a great looking bat storm thing on his computer. We'll just use that. A lot.
You can't make Dracula without blood and gore though, right? Well, duh, yes you can if you want to get a 12A rating. Fuck blood. Blood is so 20th century. There's going to be no blood in this vampire movie!
Hey, but what about the girls? The girls aren't going to want to see this are they? Are you kidding me? This isn't old man Dracula sneaking into a virgin's boudoir. This is sexy young Dracula, sensitive Dracula, romantic Dracula. This Dracula reads poetry like whatsit in Twilight and bares his chest like that other whatsit in Twilight and he has really nice teeth. We'll get some up and coming good looking guy. Someone a bit cheap who needs a leg up. Someone British. And you know what else we'll do? We'll make Castle Dracula look like Hogwarts; not just a bit, we'll make it look exactly like Hogwarts.
I know some of you are scared and I can understand that. You're still smarting from 'Van Helsing' and 'The Wolfman' and 'I, Frankenstein' and all that, but this is going to be different, this is going to be classy. I've already thought of some great dialogue:
"The great impaler can't even penetrate his woman." Get it?
I tell you, they'll all be quoting that line years from now.
Look, there's no denying that this is a big important film for us. So what we're going to do is give it to a nobody director. That way, if it goes tits up, we'll blame it on him. If it doesn't, and he's actually good, then we have him tied in to a three movie deal. Win - win. Fucking win!"
"Trust me! It's going to look great."
Having said all that - I quite enjoyed it....at first. It was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting and the first hour rattles along in an entertaining fashion. After the first bat swarm battle sequence though, I did quickly become bored. It became repetitive and ran out of steam (a sword fight in a tent?) and I just wanted to hit fast forward. To me the whole thing felt like the pilot episode for a tv series. On that level it was just fine. The ending only served to make this feeling more apparent as it clearly paves the way for a series of bland sequels that will sidestep having anything to do with the source material other than the character names. The strange thing about the whole concept is you can really sense this film struggling to make Dracula relevant for today's audiences when there's really no need. There hasn't been a good adaptation for decades. There certainly isn't a definitive version ('Nosferatu"is as close as we get) out there, so why not, just, you know, make a really good retelling of Dracula. That would be more relevant and exciting than pissing about with trying to make a square peg fit a round hole.
The Count gives it five out of ten. It's average entertainment, interesting at times, tedious towards the end.
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