BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
A film review by Jason D. Corley
Copyright 1993 Jason D. Corley
Let me sum this up, as far as we understood it:
It's 1460. ("I'll attack any Church for $14.60!") Constantinople (not Istanbul). A guy that looks about as much like a 15th Century Romanian warlord as Bella Abzug (Ryan interjects: "Well, he did look a lot like Bella Abzug later in the movie") has a tearful farewell with Winona Ryder (Ryder rents movie services!) and the audience is bewildered. Are we supposed to care? Anyway, he rides out past a bunch of silhouettes that then start running each other through with cardboard poles and pretending to be killed in a sort of mime show. The only thing missing is the guy pretending to be in a shrinking box. Then after killing about 500,000 people singlehandedly, Bella Abzug kisses this big-ass medallion it looks like he stole from L. L. Cool J., and that's supposed to impress the audience and make it all better. So he goes back to the model of the castle, but first they have to push a dressmaker's dummy with Winona's wig on out of a window and watch it fall really stiffly into a matte painting of a chasm. I'm surprised they didn't show it break apart on the rocks. So he gets there and lo and behold it's a miracle, she's fallen fifty miles and there isn't a scratch on her except she smeared her lipstick, but she should have known better than to try to put it on on the way down. He picks up a letter that says he may already have won, screams, "I hate Ed McMahon!" and discusses religion with these grey-haired Ewoks for a while. Then he stabs his sword into the middle of this wood cross for no apparent reason and ketchup starts squirting out of it, along with cherry Jell-O mix and water with red food coloring in it. (A lot of it, Ryan says, real mess.) So he goes up and starts swilling it down. Now the only thing I'm thinking here is, "Cholesterol. He's gonna have such clogged arteries," and WHAMMO! We're four centuries in the future and all of those carefully crafted and individualized characters are dead except for Dracula.
Ryan turns to me (in the theatre) and says, "So we're about half an hour through this one, right?" and I say, "No, man, that was just the prologue," and he says, "Aaaah."
So when we look back at the screen, some guy that looks vaguely like Barton Fink is eating flies. He does a pretty good job, I suppose, but we have NO IDEA WHAT THE HECK THIS HAS TO DO WITH ANYTHING!
So then Ted "Theodore" Logan gets sent out to do Barton Fink's job by a guy with big huge whiskers and a big bald head. "Excellent!" I say in the theatre. (Ryan later says, What was the point of that? I mean, I wouldn't send Ted on a financial mission ... I wouldn't trust him to pick up a paper at 7-11! I said Strange things are afoot at the 7-11.) So off goes Ted to say goodbye to his babe girlfriend. Ryan claims Winona was "pumped up" for this movie, but I think they just didn't make her wear all those ... restraints ... Victorian women really had to wear (Later, Ryan would comment, The raw sexuality of Victorian England!) So she's been looking at old Playboy "Best of ..." leather- bound collections and cooing over them with the Slut o' The Century, so she's hot to trot. So she drags him off into the garden to smooch a while, but later claims that they've "only kissed" (Yeah, Ryan says, but only kissed *what*?)
So off he goes, writing in his diary the whole 3 day trip and complaining about the food and the runs I suppose, like all English people do when they go abroad, but he writes very well considering he's riding on a bumpy train, I mean he never even smears his ink *once* (I'm bitter. I can't do that with *my* fountain pens...). These huge eyes appear in the sky but he doesn't pay attention to them because they obviously have cataracts and couldn't see a thing anyway. The eyes pop up again and again, but nobody ever says anything about them. My personal theory: it's Ross Perot, because in one of the scenes I think I saw a gigantic pair of ears to match.
So anyway he gets dropped off by this carriage with someone wearing so many necklaces ... well, actually it's probably L. L. Cool J. back for revenge! L. L. Cool J. gives Ted a crucifix and says, "Wear all you want, we'll make more." So Ted kind of stands there and the carriage takes off like a bat out of hell and once they're off-screen they say "Man! That was close! We almost had to stay in that crappy movie!" So Ted just stands there. In the theatre, Ryan says, "So, I guess I'll just wait here then." And then the wolves howl a bit and then they howl a lot and Ted sees them kind of trotting through the underbrush like he's Marlon Perkins on "Wild Kingdom." And the whole thing turns into a PBS special on wolves for a little while until another carriage shows up and a guy with 9 foot long arms and Lee Press-On Claws pushes Ted into the carriage. It takes off, goes ninety miles an hour (despite the fact that it's horse-drawn) along a two-inch wide road next to that same matte painting of a chasm and eventually it passes through a bath of ultraviolet light, apparently Dracula has installed a clean room somewhere out there in the Romanian wilderness, and then these huge portculli slam shut and Ted says, "Bogus." And then he gets out of the carriage and the driver takes off with his luggage because Ted didn't tip enough. So he goes up to the doors, that open before he gets there. Doors do that a lot, but does he say anything about it? No. Does he act surprised at all? No. Does he even comment on the draft? No. Does he immediately try to call Bill and Rufus and tell them to get their butts out here like he should? No.
What does he do, he goes on inside and sits down across from Dracula, Prince of the Vampires, you know how we know he's the Prince? Because he *dresses* like Prince, with this big huge crimson wedding dress, without a veil, that goes on and on and on and leaves the room at least fifteen minutes after he does. And Gary Oldman has so much makeup on he always looks like Worf trying to emote. And we won't even mention his haircut except for the rather obvious comment that if he put on a hat and cut off that ponytail he would look like John Carradine in Kung Fu, but without that he looks like a cross between Telly Savalas, Cher and a bottle of Tide Extra Strength Bleach. So they banter a little while and Oldman gives us his impersonation of Bela Lugosi's accent, which, though real, sounded as phony as Michael Jackson's nose. Then we get some really neat shadow special effects (Ryan says, I can make a bunny!) but unfortunately they are never referred to and even occur when Oldman's not even in the *country*, as we see when we go to the party scene.
Now I am the first guy to admit that I like parties. I like them in movies too. But lets get one thing straight--my idea of a party is not one in which Winona Ryder stands on the side of the room and watches Slut-O-Matic reject three losers simultaneously ... and that's the only thing that happens at this one. We are introduced to three guys just long enough to know that we dislike and don't care about any of them, and then we get a dramatic closeup on Winona's face as the shadow puppet does its thing again, and we never get to see what happens to the rest of the party because of a strange dream sequence of Ted's in which we get to see Winona and the Sultaness of Slut share some tonsils in the garden and Winona run up and down in her nightshirt. Now, we haven't got to the part where she *really is* running around in her nightshirt so this is totally gratuitous.
Anyway, Ted wakes up and there's a really good shaving scene, which is unfortunate because it immediately ends and we cut to Winona and the "Filmed in Slut-O-Rama" girl in the garden reading Ted's letter, and IT says, "You may already have won." But that's okay, because Slutbo is *marrying* Ed McMahon, or it might be Ed McMahon, as far as the audience knows BECAUSE WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THOSE GUYS LAST NIGHT TO TELL THEM APART!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, then we have some dramatic closeups of Ted as he wanders around specifically where Oldman told him not to go (good one, Gary), and he goes in and lies down in a room where it looks like Michaelangelo's been doing some painting, because there's dropcloths on the floor and naked women coming up out of them. So Ted's thinking, "All right, dude!" and about to do the air guitar, when the girls grow fangs, melt L. L. Cool J.'s crucifix and make him say, "Bogus!" He's really getting into it, though, so just as the women close in for the kill (buck-a-woowwww chicka chicka), in floats Oldman like a shrivelled-up prune on wires, sort of a Peter Pan type thing and says, "Get off him; he's mine," which itself conjures up many images, none of them pretty. While the audience's mind is preoccupied with these images, Dracula throws a baby to the women, but we don't get to see much, just a dramatic closup of Ted getting closer and closer up until we are sure that we will be seeing the rest of the movie in Nostril-Vision, and then it cuts off and goes back to London.
Actually, that's not totally accurate. We get back to London in a burst of jump cuts, filtered backgrounds and fade-outs and some really weird pictures of the zoo, with animals jumping around and cats and dogs living together and some otherwise innocent lemurs temporarily trapped in this stinker of celluloid (The lemur was of course the famous ringtail lemur actor Lionel the Leaping Lemur of London) and then there's a little narration about daylight and just then (like we weren't *even* expecting it) Dracula bursts out of a crate and Ryan says "Ewww ... he awakes with the worst face of the morning." Shouldn't have flown Southwest, buddy.
That night, we finally get to see Winona Ryder run down some stairs in the rain in her see-through nightgown into the garden after OctoSlutty wanders out in kind of a daze. As she bounces down the steps, I say, "Ow! Ow! Ooouch! OOh! Wish Ouch! They had Ouch! invented sport bras! Ouch! Ow!". So then she runs up and down and eventually she comes across living proof that Slutzilla will go out with anyone, 'cause she's making the sign of the three-humped camel with The Cowardly Lion, and he turns around and sums up the whole film in one line: "Do not see me!"
But no! No! We're only halfway through! We've still got the Knee-Level Dachsund Cam that goes in fast motion until you get motion sickness and by God Coppola says, "We bought the thing and we're gonna use it!"
Meanwhile, Ted is back at the castle, getting slobbered over by the three topless babes, but he still thinks it's bogus just because he has to give a little blood. Later, Hopkins asks him, "Did you at any time taste any of their blood?" and Ted says, "No way dude!" and Ryan says "So what exactly *did* you taste then?" But anyway he gets up on the roof of the castle and re-enacts the dress dummy sequence from the first part of the movie in case anyone's forgotten it now that we've only seen it three times, but he doesn't smear his lipstick because he's a professional. Suddenly we're watching a wilderness survival flick and he stumbles into a convent where we don't get to watch the spankings.
So the nuns write Winona a letter telling her that she may already be a winner because there's this guy that claims to be Ed McMahon that wants to marry her and if she can just hop on the Concorde and get to Romania by that evening they can be married at the same time Tonsil Juggler Lucy gets offed so Coppola can have his little artistic orgasm with splicing back and forth between flowers and old men saying, "No purchase necessary to enter" in Latin and the ketchup all over the place.
But first while Winona is in the air swilling down champagne and eating caviar somewhere over the Carpathians, Anthony Hopkins (who is great mugging at the camera) comes in, opens Wilma Slutstone's mouth and says, "Good Lord, look at that!" and I say, "Cavities! We're gonna have to drill." But he means the oversized plastic teeth she's wearing from last Halloween. The fiancee says, "You gotta get those things out before my wedding night!" and the Texan says, "Wimp!" Anyway they decide to stand guard after Hopkins pulls a little David Copperfield stunt on them to prove what idiots they all are. The fiancee goes on a binge with a *huge* bottle of whiskey and the Texan stands outside with a rifle and looks manly. Then we get the Scottish Terrier Cam "sneaking" up on the Texan, who can't see it because it's hiding under the cover of a lot of air, and then it *charges* and the Texan who we believe is a real stud (up until now) *misses* at point-blank range with his rifle. So the thing crashes through the door and knocks the fiancee aside (like it really needed to, he'd taken enough booze to knock out a horse), and chats with Slutterwoman a bit, and then makes the ketchup pipes burst I guess, because the furniture starts spraying goo all over the place.
Then at the funeral, somber music plays, and everyone gathers around like the end of an Agatha Christie novel, like we're really supposed to care that someone that would be slutty regardless of what *species* someone was, let alone sex or personality went and got herself blown up. "Good thing she's hermetically sealed," Ryan said. "Well, that could have gone better," I said, imitating the fiancee's voice. Ryan as Texan: "Well if you hadn'ta been drinkin' ...." Me as fiancee: "Well, you're the one who missed ...." Ryan as Texan: "Oh, that's right, I'm the jerk, she's *your* crappy girlfriend ..." but by this time the camera has panned off this heartwrenching scene and Hopkins livens up the movie with another great line about disemboweling. It was really good, and Ryan and I applauded it.
So anyway, Loosey's dead ... or is she? (Who *cares*? But I digress....) And we get some gratuitous scenes of the Doctor shooting up morphine ... though maybe that was earlier, Jeez, what am I trying to do, find continuity in this yawnfest? Anyway, so the guys magically realise through the power of Francis Ford Coppola that Fondle Woman is still going around and sucking things but do they tell the audience this? NOOOOooo.... They just start opening up tombs at random and bitching about how emotionally difficult this is for them. They also act by staring into the camera for long periods of time and waving guns around. Pretty impressive, really. Oscar-award-winning stuff here. *anyway*, so they undo her little Ziploc coffin and lo and behold it's empty except for her dress which she never takes anywhere anyway. Then they hear her coming down the stairs, and she uses her Clapper to turn on the candles. They know it's her because they canceled the newspaper to her tomb and the milk delivery doesn't come until morning. So she comes in with this little androgynous kid-thing, sort of a small white Michael Jackson with curly hair, and the audience is supposed to care, but we really don't get to see much of him/her/it at all because it immediately gets dropped on the floor and one of the equally anonymous men grabs it up and disappears from the screen we hope forever but we can't really be sure. So Kung-Fu Grip G. I. Josephine decides that she's in trouble (she shouldn't have dropped the kid, he/she/it was her only weapon) and she reacts first by breathing at them ("Phew! Who died in here?") and secondly by how she reacts to every situation, by trying to grope the nearest thing with recognizable genitalia. He just stands there like a dope (everyone acts like a dope around her, but we don't know if this is because of Tongue-alina or because the movie itself is a soporific) until she starts snarling, but usually she gets at least *some* of their clothes off, and most of hers before she reaches this stage, so Hopkins pulls a cross and starts shouting. That's okay because the music is playing so loud you can barely hear him say, "Get away from him, you *bitch*! And take that off!" Eventually she gets tired of it and lays down. Pretty convenient, too, because otherwise that stake and mallet they brought along would have been pretty useless. There's a lot more ketchup around by the time this scene is over, as Anonymous Man #1 sings, "I've been workin' on the railroad," and pounds away like one of the roustabouts in Dumbo.
So what I'm wondering is, "Are we gonna have to have another funeral?" but apparently one is enough even for Coppola, so instead everything gets real jerky and we get to watch Dracula in his Transformer-Suave mode meet Winona. They go to watch some snuff flicks, but when she puts up resistance, he calls Lassie. "What's that girl? Vlad is trapped in Deadrock Canyon? Can't get anywhere with Winona or her two allegedly recently expanded talents? Quick, go let her run her hands through your hair! Go on Girl!" ('cause if there's anything chicks dig, it's dog fur.)
Now we're about halfway through this stupendously long seduction sequence when I start to wonder: "So ....just exactly how much *unlike* Bram Stoker's Dracula is this movie going to be?" They keep waltzing across a Police video and staring into the camera instead of at each other. Doesn't sound like any seduction *I've* ever hear of. There's also some crap about Winona being some reincarnation of the dress dummy they threw out the castle window four hundred years ago, but in the novel, the dress dummy was celibate so I don't buy it.
'Round about this time, Anthony Hopkins and the Duke boys decided to show old Boss Hogg what exorcism was all about. Ted eats dinner and is just a regular stool pigeon about the extensive Romanian dirt smuggling ring that crisscrosses London. And Hopkins goes to the Police video and reads one of his vampire books while, you guessed it, staring into the camera. (Ryan: "Jeez, you got enough light in there? What do I look like, a fucking *candle* factory?") So they drop by the place which just *happens* to be right next door to Barton Fink's cell, so that he can yell at them that "Tresspassers will be Prosecuted". He is obviously insane.
Of course this is no place for women, which is why Winona came along, I guess, but it was probably just to get her to go into the asylum with the doctor who promptly says, "This is no place for a woman." So why did you bring her there, Dr. Kevorkian? Hmmmmm???????? She has a deep and meaningful conversation with Barton Fink, in which they discover they are actually brother and sister and Darth Vader is their father. She also asks him, "Give me his *name*, Dr. Lecter," in a rather gripping ... oh, wait, no ... sorry, those were from the identical scenes in good movies. Anyway, so she just pops right into the good Dr.'s bedroom and put on his filmy frilly lacy teddie and goes to bed. Luckily the door suddenly becomes very thick so that it now blocks the screams of the lunatics so that the music can be heard, such as it is. She naturally falls asleep immediately.
Next door at the Cleaver home, the boys are bustin' up boxes and spreading that illegal Romanian dirt around and turning on the sprinkler system and Hopkins is chanting something like "I'm not gonna pay a lot for this muffler," while swinging a cross around like a baseball bat and Coppola gives us a real interesting shot of a green thing up in the rafters ("I'm Batman!") which promptly turns into a horny green mist that rockets down the road, zig-zagging like an escaped special effect from the Disney film SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES.
So Winona's lying there (on her back, of course, since she can't fit into the bed any other way) and in comes the St. Patrick's Day dry ice which is supposed to look spooky I guess [snort], and it kinda flows up under the covers and WHAMMO! Winona is ridin' high! Molested by mist. Violated by vapour. Seduced by smoke. Fondled by fog. Rather disappointingly, it turns into Gary "Go to bed" Oldman, who promptly takes off his shirt (see, he *is* Prince) and they have a little domestic dispute about who's gonna be sucking whose blood. Eventually Winona wins out and starts sucking him off (in a nice way, I mean).
Enter the Three Stooges ("Helloooo" "Helloooooo" "Hellooooooooo" "HELLO!") and their agent, Anthony Hopkins. They look and see Winona sucking away at thin air and the Doctor immediately slaps his head and says, "I knew I forgot to lock the morphine cabinet!" but then Dracula, in his big rubbery suit phase pops up out of nowhere, takes a few bullets and grunts at them for a while. Though every character in the movie seems to understand him fine, unfortunately the audience is a bit left out. It mainly goes: ANON MAN #2: "What are you?" DRACULA SUIT: "Erruunnghan." JASON: "I'm Batman, I told you!" (It goes on like that until people are shouting at the screen "Get on with it!") So Dracula finally takes the hint and lets all the gerbils out of his suit and they all run away to find some yellow plastic tube maze somewhere. Nobody thinks to call Orkin, nooooo. They decide they're gonna chase after him. Does anyone think to take the magickal way Winona got to Romania in *one night*??? No, they take a train. On the way Winona is gettin' scarier and scarier to the characters on the train and stupider and stupider to the audience. She starts displaying her Halloween plastic teeth too.
So they make it (in a thrilling map scene) to this port city where they slap their heads and say, "Doohhh! He passed us in the night! We probably should have gotten off the train instead of waiting for the ship to sail through the passenger car!" So the Anonynmous Men take some horses and ride off, starting another thrilling map scene, and Hopkins decides to take a road trip, just him and Winona, heh heh heh (bompa chicka-wowoowwwwooowwww bompa).
First we see their cozy little home life, sitting around the Campfire and Winona does her Floocy impression because the triplets are out there somewhere and there's romance in the air. Hopkins spoils the mood by yelling, "Oxycute 'em!" and pressing a medicated pad into Winona's forehead ("It tingles!" "That means it's working.") and setting that highly flammable *snow* on fire in a little circle around them.
Next we get a chase scene filmed in Confus-O-Vision with the Anonymous Men chasing after Even More Anonymous People Who We Have No Idea Who They Are Because We've Never Seen Or Heard Of Them Before But We Know They're Bad Because The Anonymous Men We *Do* Know Are Shooting At Them And Because They Are Smuggling Dirt Back *Into* Romania. For some reason they've got to get to Dracula's little crate before the sun goes down, mainly because there's no narrator in this scene to remind Dracula that he doesn't need to just sit there, which he does for probably a full twenty minutes of footage, every so often.
Meanwhile, Hopkins is practicing a little trick he saw on Julia Child's show and whacking up the Big Sluts into Little Pieces of Veal Slutlet and throwing them into the matte painting. Just in case anyone forgot what it looked like.
And while he's off doing that Winona decides she's gonna try a little Sigfried and Roy of her own, so she climbs up on a styrofoam boulder left over from the old "Star Trek" show and cues the UV light around Drac's castle, which immediately sets off the sunset stock footage we've been seeing at different parts through the whole movie. Even though the sun is dropping behind the mountain four or five times in a row, everyone puts the accelerator to the floor and manages to reach the castle just in time for Anonymous Man #2 (Texan) to get offed in a big Kung-Fu fight scene. As in all good kung-fu fight scenes he lives long enough for a doctor to shake his head sadly even though the doctor is busy for the rest of the scene which is about fifteen minutes long and he got knifed in the first twelve *seconds*. To sum up: Drac gets a knife in the chest and a cut to the throat. Anon. Man #2 finally dies and Winona comes in in her Rifle Packin' Mama mode and says, "Will you guys end this stupid scene already? And will you do the same for me when my time comes?" to which they all reply, "We'll do it to you whenever you want, baby."
So she gets disgusted with them and drags Vlad inside ("Come on, dummy") and there's a real tender scene where they shine a spotlight in Oldman's face ("Where were you in 1460?") and they run the footage from the beginning of the movie in reverse, which makes us all really nervous because we think we're gonna have to watch the whole thing again ("Maybe it will make more sense this time"). And then there's a final emotional parting scene where Winona pushes the knife the rest of the way through him, twists it, and jumps up and down laughing maniacally, then whacks off his head ("She cut off Big Jake's head!") Her complexion clears up a bit, showing that murder really is good for the skin.
And the final shot is of the ceiling mural which slowly lights up and shows Dracula and the dress dummy in heaven. (JASON: "Aaahhhh ... so it was the ceiling all the time. Now everything falls into place. It all makes sense now ... HUH?")
From Jason and Ryan: Direct all flames to corleyj@gas.uug.arizona.edu so we can laugh at them. Also, folloups to rec.arts.movies.
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