Bram Stoker's Dracula / Mary Shelley's Frankenstien (DVD)

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In one tidy package comes a pair of classic monster films: "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," respectively directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh. Pairing them invites comparison, of course. But picking your favorite monster movie is a bit like trying to pick your favorite James Bond. It can be a subjective affair, especially if you consider the full range of films. Some will hold fast to the belief that nothing can ever top the mesmerizing eyes and cape work of Bela Lugosi or the neckbolts and stiff walk of Boris Karloff in the 1931 versions of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein." And in truth, while other versions have met with some favor, both of those early performances and films were tough acts to follow.

Since then, many have tried, and many have failed, with filmmakers wrestling with ways to take the creatures out of the realm of monster fairy tales and into a more penetrating narrative reality that would have greater contemporary relevance. With this double-disc set, Sony has packaged two relatively recent efforts (1992, 1994) which returned to the original novels for inspiration. Call it a New Historical approach, but both directors seemed more concerned with staying faithful to the text and period in which the drama was set than playing to the level of expectations for audiences of contemporary horror films.

Having grown up during the Fifties' monster revival and worked on plastic models of the Lugosi and Karloff monsters as a youngster, I have to admit that I'm one of those who thought the originals so wonderful that few of the remakes seemed appealing. But I approached these two films fresh, having somehow managed to miss seeing them until now. One I found surprisingly overwrought, and the other surprisingly inventive.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (Film Value: 6)
If I didn't know that Francis Ford Coppola directed this film, I wouldn't have learned it from watching. Coppola goes ballistically Gothic, celebrating all of the excess that made Gothic novels and novellas so popular: the gaudily opulent lifestyles, the upper-class romances in chivalric tradition, the horrors and mysteries lurking behind every column and curtain, and an atmosphere that writers such as Edgar Allan Poe deliberately manipulated to raise every suspicion and every hair on a person's body. Many of the scenes in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" have a Bacchanalian feel, with a golden tint washing over them, especially the orgiastic scenes—and we're speaking literally here, folks. There's nudity which seems writhingly gratuitous unless you consider that the name of the game here seems to be creating an atmosphere of, as I said, Gothic excess.

Under Coppola's direction, Gary Oldman plays Vlad the Impaler slash Count Dracula with a melodramatic flair so worthy of silent movies that you half expect eerie organ music to crescendo every time he gesticulates wildly. The problem I had with his performance, and the tone of the entire production, for that matter, was that I was never really sure whether "Bram Stoker's Dracula" was intentionally campy or unintentionally so. I mean, I thought it was so over-the-top that it was tongue-in-cheek funny, but did Coppola and the others know it when they were making the film, or were they trying for a strict but serious Gothic interpretation?

The action opens with Vlad the Impaler leaving his Transylvanian castle to fight faraway in the Crusades. He returns to find that his beloved wife, thinking him dead, had hurled herself off the castle walls to her death. Not surprisingly, Vlad turns against the church that he fought for and curses God, vowing to embrace the dark forces. Blood gushes from inanimate objects in true Gothic fashion, and then it's a quick cut from 1462 to 1897 London. We're introduced to Keanu Reeves, who plays a bank attorney sent to Count Dracula to broker a real estate transaction that's never quite clear. What is clear, though, is that the agent he's replacing isn't well at all. In fact, he's gone quite mad. Something happened to him at that castle, but Reeves forges ahead anyhow.

What he finds when he gets to the castle is a grotesque (another Gothic tradition) old man reminiscent of the emperor in "Star Wars" who insists, with a capital "I," that Jonathan Harker remain for quite some time. Harker is engaged to Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), but things get complicated when the Count/Vlad sees in her the spitting image of his dearly departed Elisabeta (also Ryder, in the opening Crusades-era sequence) who's returned to earth to be reunited with him. Of course Prof. Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) gets into the act as things get weirder and weirder, but I found the plot disappointingly familiar and the performances good but not great—which put the burden of my response to the film on the Gothic characters and atmosphere that Coppola cultivated. Those who are more approving of the film's excesses will respond to the movie's tone more positively, but I felt that it was caught, like Dracula himself, somewhere between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Film Value: 7)