Argento's Dracula (2013)

 

In the woods near her village, a young woman named Tania meets her lover for a secret tryst. But when you live in Transylvania, it's a bad idea to go out at night. Tania is chased and killed by a supernatural beast.

Sometime later, Jonathan Harker arrives in the village.  Harker is a librarian hired by Count Dracula, a nobleman from the area.  He happens to have friends in the village, and pays them a brief visit before heading up to Dracula's castle.

As a stranger to the area, Harker is unaware of Tania's death.  Thus he has no reason to be alarmed when it is she who greets him at the castle door.  We in the audience, of course, know that he should be very worried indeed.  Of course, we've known that since before the movie even began: it is a Dracula film, after all.

Directed by famed Italian director Dario Argento, this film is also known as Dracula 3D and filmed for that format. It is refreshingly light on things flying straight out of the screen, but it is quite the sunniest Dracula film I have ever seen. Possibly because of the needs of the 3D cameras, it is very brightly lit, sometimes overly so, which ironically makes many of the visuals look a bit flat. 

Also a bit flat are the performances.  They are curiously subdued, stilted and even listless, with all emotions muted.  This seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, but to my mind it's very odd decision.  At their core, Horror films are all about emotions: fear and dread!  To have the entire cast seem so disengaged from the purportedly terrifying things happening to them makes it hard for those things to seem scary to me as a viewer.

The infamous Count himself also seems to totally lack a sense of menace. Possibly Argento and his team are going for an urbane and seductive variation on the vampire of legend, but if so they don't really hit the mark.  For one thing, late in the film he just abruptly turns into a giant CGI praying mantis, for some reason, and I don't think "giant cannibalistic insect" is many people's idea of "sexy".  It's also not scary, to be honest, given the mediocre execution.  And it feels like something out of a different film, given the way it just suddenly happens and then is never referenced again.

The giant mantis is not the only dodgy CGI effect, alas.  There's a scene where a vampire bursts into "flame", and it looks terrible.

Now I could forgive the dodgy effects work - though probably not the baffling direction of the performances - if the script was sufficiently fun and distinctive. But while they do seem to have tried to mix things up and include some surprises - this movie deviates from the Stoker's novel in many ways, both small and large - the result is not particularly coherent, and it definitely falls short of "fun".

Argento's career peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, and his work since then has generally been poorly received.  If his version of Dracula is anything to judge by, that reception is entirely justified.