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It's fascinating seeing a movie that could have been so potentially good wreck like two freight trains head-on.

Without any goth tendencies whatsoever, I can assure you(I'm wearing black right now, but that's because it's cold), Dracula and I go way back. I read and loved the book at an appallingly early age in the wake of seeing 'SALEM'S LOT, and soon after saw the best version of Drac(and the most accurate to the book; as I recall everything was there but the epistolary style) on PBS, a BBC miniseries starring Louis Jourdan(who was surprisingly great) as the Count. I love the story, its images, even its bizarre multiple metaphors for repressed Victorian sexuality. I usually try to see new versions when they come out, just to see if someone got it right-as film it produces striking images and drama indeed when they do. And they do rarely. Why the adapters feel the need to put all these unnecessary prostheses on limbs not needing amputation I don't know. It's a perfectly good, and still scary, story when you TRY to tell it. Few do.

The worst versions I've seen would include both the laughably arch Bela Lugosi version(sorry-it hasn't aged at all well; Dwight Frye is the only cool thing about it) and the oddly well-lit version with Frank Langella, which was just boring and stupid. It's silly, I know, but I really wanted to see a GOOD version for once, lacking a tape of the BBC version. The best modern version I've seen is Werner Herzog's remake of NOSFERATU(which I find substantially better than the original, and wittier), but that's just an interpretation, not an adaptation, and it's more contemplative, beautiful, and deeply sad than frightening.

So I settled on this thing, believing the hype that it was faithful(as though they got Stoker's permission to put the name in the title), and blindly trusting in the long-past-its-sell-by-date reputation of Coppola. I forgot that the Coppola I loved died in the Phillipines around 1980. And there in the very first scene is nothing Stoker ever wrote, nor that happened in history, which they seem to be trying to add to the story. And clumsily, with a big polo mallet. Let me say that by far the stupidest element of this version-which I'll just say didn't scare me one bit and be done with that-is the hammering of a love story, and a reincarnation story at that, into the plot, which twists it entirely out of shape. I'll ruin it for you. Mina(at least in this version they almost get the names right) is the reincarnation of Dracula's

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