Dracula 3-D (2012)

If, back in the late seventies, in the wake of Profondo Rosso (1975) or Suspiria (1977), it had been announced that Dario Argento was to direct a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, then expectations would have been sky high.  The idea of the director bringing the visual sense, deft use of acoustic effects and sheer style that he had demonstrated in his 'Giallo' movies, to the Gothic classic would have been something to look forward to.  Unfortunately, though, Argento didn't make his Dracula until 2012, when his best films seemed long behind him, with the result being a major disappointment. To be honest, the last Argento film I really enjoyed was Opera (1987).  While (in my opinion) an improvement on its predecessor, Phenomena (1985), it still fell well below the high standards he had set himself in his earlier films.  But in comparison to Dracula 3-D (2012), it looks a masterpiece.  The film's problems are numerous but start with a fundamentally flawed script which fails completely to offer any new angles on the oft-told tale.  Indeed, it seems to be a compendium of ideas ransacked from other Dracula movies and lumped together with little consideration of coherence, characterisation or plot development.  Large parts of the scenario - Harker being a librarian rather than an estate agent and the decision to set the whole story in Transyvania, thereby relocating key London scenes to a village near the castle, comes from Hammer's Dracula (1958), with Van Helsing's casting of the silver bullet coming from the company's later Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), while the identification of the Count with the historical Vlad Tepes Dracula, (not mention Mina being the reincarnation of his lost love), is taken from the Coppola Dracula (which, in turn, had lifted the idea from Dan Curtis' TV movie Dracula (1974), which had starred Jack Palance), to give a few examples.  

The problem with this approach is that it means that various significant characters and events central to the source novel vanish - Lucy's suitors and the arrival in Whitby of the ghost ship carrying Dracula to England, for instance - and, worse, by wrenching these borrowings out of their original context, the whole story becomes dislocated.  In the Hammer Dracula, the librarian Harker is actually an associate of Van Helsing, at Castle Dracula to try and kill the Count, which, after his demise, neatly brings the vampire hunter into the story.  In this version, however, with Harker simply being a librarian and there being no Dr Seward and no asylum to justify his presence, Van Helsing simply wanders into the latter stages of the story.  His presence is 'explained' by a clumsy flashback to 'Carfax Asylum' in England and an earlier encounter with Dracula, (implying that the events of the novel have all occurred offscreen in the film's past).  It makes little sense and never really justifies Van Helsing's rather arbitrary presence in the film.  Worse still, without a local asylum, the character of Renfield is left high and dry, presented as some kind of random local nutter.  Stripping the story down to its bare essentials can pay dividends for film makers - as shown by Hammer's fast-moving and highly efficient 1958 production - but unfortunately, Dracula 3-D's script feels the need to provide substitutes for the missing characters and events - none of them very good nor particularly interesting.  The whole sub-plot about the village's leading figures colluding with the Count for a quiet life ultimately goes nowhere and isn't developed enough to provide any kind of commentary upon the nature of feudalism, while characters like the policeman, the inn keeper and the sinister trader are barely sketched in.  

But even with a weak script, prime Argento would surely have been able to make something out of the material.  But it isn't prime Argento at the helm.  There is none of the visual sense and lush style of his best 'Giallo' movies here and consequently no atmosphere, no suspense or feeling of menace.  Far too much of the film seems to take place in bright sunlight, on the streets of an underpopulated and far too clean and wholesome looking village.  The sets are unimpressive and, in many scenes, cheap looking.  The whole thing comes over as flat and uninvolving, like a TV movie.  This impression is reinforced by the dreadful CGI used in too many scenes, with the practical special effects being no more convincing.  On top of all of this, Argento fails to get interesting performances from most of his cast.  In particular, Thomas Kretschmann is badly miscast as the most underwhelming Dracula ever to see the screen - he fails to exude any menace, let alone the imperiousness and sense of ancient evil the role requires.  Marta Gastini and Unax Ulgade as Mina and Johnathan Harker respectivelsy likewise fail to breath any life into their underwritten characters, while Asia Argento's Lucy is largely uninteresting, whether live or undead.  Only Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing comes close to giving the sort of performance required for this sort of film.  While his Van Helsing is neither as crazy and eccentric as Anthony Hopkins' interpretation in the Coppola film, nor as steely and obsessive as Peter Cushing's in the Hammer films, he is at least memorable and the only character in the film who seems to know what they are doing.

Obviously, I've never seen Dracula 3-D in 3-D, so I might have been missing something.  Perhaps when shown stereoscopically it doesn't feel as flat or look as cheap.  But I can only judge it by the 2-D version I was recently able to stream, (which, to be absolutely fair, seemed to be a TV edit, cutting out some gore and nudity).  On that basis, it is a major disappointment.  Particularly for fans of the director, like myself.   It just doesn't feel like an Argento film, capturing neither the somewhat stylised look of his seventies films, (which it would have benefitted from), nor the somewhat harder edged, more realistic look of his eighties and nineties output. Even frequent collaborator and 'Goblin' keyboardist Claudio Simonetti's score fails to lift the film, sounding bland, derivative and detatched from the on screen action.  Worst of all is the lack of orginality in the film's execution: it is a film of borrowings, none of them apparently properly understood, resulting in a treatment that feels tired and hackneyed.  It speaks volumes that Argento wouldn't direct another film for ten years after this failure.