Dracula (alternately titled
Dracula's Curse and
The Kiss of Dracula) is an Italian TV movie made in 2002. It is based on the 1897
novel of the same nameDracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula.Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally it is an epistolary novel,...
by
Bram StokerAbraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.-Early life:He...
, though it updates the events of the novel to the present day.
- Patrick Bergin
Patrick Connolly Bergin is an Irish actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the menacing husband of Julia Roberts' character in the thriller Sleeping with the Enemy. Bergin also appeared as Robin Hood in a 1991 TV movie...
Count Vladislav Tepes / Dracula
- Giancarlo Giannini
Giancarlo Giannini is an Italian actor and dubber.Giannini was born La Spezia, Liguria, Italy. He studied at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, and made his film debut in a small part in Fango sulla metropoli in 1965...
Dr. Enrico Valenzi
- Hardy Krüger Jr. Jonathan Harker
- Stefania Rocca
Stefania Rocca is an Italian actress.Rocca is best known for her roles in the films Nirvana , The Talented Mr. Ripley and Dracula . She also was the lead in Dario Argento's The Card Player. Her most recent appearance was in the Italian movie, Commediasexi where she played the main character,...
Mina Murray
- Muriel Baumeister
Muriel Baumeister is an German-Austrian television actress.-External links:}}* * *...
Lucy Westenra
- Kai Wiesinger
Kai Wiesinger is a German actor.- Life and Work :Kai Wiesinger began taking private acting lessons as a teenager. After his Zivildienst , he became an acting student in Munich...
Dr.
Dracula (alternately titled
Dracula's Curse and
The Kiss of Dracula) is an Italian TV movie made in 2002. It is based on the 1897
novel of the same nameDracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula.Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. Structurally it is an epistolary novel,...
by
Bram StokerAbraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.-Early life:He...
, though it updates the events of the novel to the present day.
Cast
- Patrick Bergin
Patrick Connolly Bergin is an Irish actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the menacing husband of Julia Roberts' character in the thriller Sleeping with the Enemy. Bergin also appeared as Robin Hood in a 1991 TV movie...
Count Vladislav Tepes / Dracula
- Giancarlo Giannini
Giancarlo Giannini is an Italian actor and dubber.Giannini was born La Spezia, Liguria, Italy. He studied at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, and made his film debut in a small part in Fango sulla metropoli in 1965...
Dr. Enrico Valenzi
- Hardy Krüger Jr. Jonathan Harker
- Stefania Rocca
Stefania Rocca is an Italian actress.Rocca is best known for her roles in the films Nirvana , The Talented Mr. Ripley and Dracula . She also was the lead in Dario Argento's The Card Player. Her most recent appearance was in the Italian movie, Commediasexi where she played the main character,...
Mina Murray
- Muriel Baumeister
Muriel Baumeister is an German-Austrian television actress.-External links:}}* * *...
Lucy Westenra
- Kai Wiesinger
Kai Wiesinger is a German actor.- Life and Work :Kai Wiesinger began taking private acting lessons as a teenager. After his Zivildienst , he became an acting student in Munich...
Dr. Johan Seward
- Alessio Boni Quincy Moritz
- Conrad Hornby Arthur Holmwood
- Brett Forest R. M. Roenfield
Plot summary
At a ballroom of a hospital charity party in
BudapestBudapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it serves as the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation center and is considered an important hub in Central Europe. In 2009, Budapest had 1,712,210 inhabitants, down from a mid-1980s...
, the successful
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
lawyer Jonathan Harker (Hardy Krüger Jr.) suddenly proposes to his girlfriend Mina (Stefania Rocca). He wants to marry her within the week. Their friends Lucy (Muriel Baumaster), Quincy (Alessio Boni) and Arthur (Conrad Hornby) have been invited by Jonathan and have just arrived for the wedding, all without Mina's awareness. Meanwhile, they meet the promoter of the party, the psychiatrist Dr. Seward (Kai Wiesinger). Later in the same night, Jonathan is called by a rich client, Tepes (Patrick Bergin), who hires him to prepare the inventory of the wealth of his uncle, the count Vladislav Tepes (Patrick Bergin), in
RomaniaRomania is a country located in Southeastern and Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory...
. Jonathan travels to the Carpathian Mountains in his
PorschePorsche SE is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury high performance automobiles, which is majority-owned by the Piëch and Porsche families. Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG , often shortened to Porsche AG, is responsible and manufacturer of the Porsche automobile line...
, has an accident and finally arrives in the count's old
castleA castle is a defensive structure seen as one of the main symbols of the Middle Ages. The term has a history of scholarly debate surrounding its exact meaning, but it is usually regarded as being distinct from the general terms fort or fortress, in that it describes a residence of a monarch or...
.
Vlad Tepes, here calling himself Count Vladislav Tepes, decides to leave his castle and move to the west. He says he feels tired from Rumania's decline and the seclusion of his life.
In Budapest he discusses some illegal business with Harker. He also wants Jonathan's help in turning his collection of paintings, jewels and his gold deposits to cash. Jonathan's friends businessman Quincey Morris, specialising in money swindles, and Arthur Holmwood, a British diplomat who is in a debt, offer to help. Though Jonathan and Arthur have their doubts about the deal Quincey convinces them that money is all that matters and its one true power that makes the world go around.
Dracula gets very interested in those young people—the men, hungry for money and power; Lucy, who wants to sleep in many beds, in many cities, have new experiences and live for ever; and Mina, who wants to change the world and end human suffering. Throughout the film Dracula tries to seduce all five of them into his own world, make them wish to become vampires. Focusing again and again on how hypocritical morality is and promising them the loss of their consciences, he says survival of the fittest is the proper way and even the strong cannot save the weak. He also references God's slaughters in the Bible to prove that humanity was created in his image, the image of a killer.
There to stop him is the researcher of the occult and Seward's teacher Dr. Enrico Valenzi the one who believes that Dracula can be defeated when he faces a strong will empowered by faith. But throughout this film he raises more and more self-doubts and his will is almost broken by the end.
Its Mina, half-way through her transformation to a vampire, that manages to make Dracula trust her and kills him as he holds her in an embrace.The films end with Mina still having the vampire's mark and how that affects is remain a question.
Deviations from the novel
This list is not exhaustive, but intended to convey a sense of the differences between the
filmFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
and the
novelA novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
:
- The setting is shifted to the early twenty-first century and Hungary
Hungary , in English officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in the Carpathian Basin of Central Europe, bordered by Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Its capital is Budapest. Hungary is a member of OECD, NATO, EU, V4 and is a Schengen state...
.
- Mina kills Dracula.
- Dracula actively tries to recruit the men as well as the women as vampires, evidently with some kind of Armageddon
Armageddon is the site of an epic battle associated with the end time prophecies of the Abrahamic religions....
in mind.
- Abraham Van Helsing is renamed Enrico Valenzi.
- There is no chase to Romania.
- Dracula disguises himself as a young man named Vladislav Tepes and tells Harker that his uncle (Dracula as an elderly man) wishes to buy Carfax.
- Renfield's name is changed to Roenfield, and he survives
- Dracula is explicitly identified as Vladislav Tepes
Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler , or simply Dracula , was a Wallachian voivode. His first reign as crown prince took place at age 17, during the same year of his release from Turkish captivity, in 1448...
- The Demeter is renamed the Tug.
Reception
Critical reaction to the film has been mixed to negative. David Johnson of
DVD Verdict offered a positive review, saying: "Everyone involved commits to doing an okay job, and the production values and general atmosphere help shed the burden of the film stock and sad-sack effects. Bergin's Dracula is effectively crusty and malicious, and Muriel Baumeister has a good time hamming it up as the infected Lucy." Others were less positive:
The SF, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review wrote, "While the film does an excellent job in updating
Dracula to the midst of New Europe's
nouveau richeNouveau riche , or new money, refers to a person who has acquired considerable wealth within his or her generation. This term is generally to emphasize that the individual was previously part of a lower socioeconomic rank, and that such wealth has provided the means for the acquisition of goods or...
, director Roger Young lets the show down considerably in the second half. ... The script does get caught up in some pretentious natterings [and] the performances are particularly uneven."
Noel Megahey of
DVD Times said, "It's [the] awkwardness in the script and the dialogue that weighs heavily on the film, although the film actually does operate half-way successfully when it moves into the non-verbal action sequences. What really sinks the film in the end, though, is not the weakness of the special effects, but the performances and the delivery of the pan-European cast that struggles through their semi-dubbed English-language lines." David Hall of
EatMyBrains.com said, "There have been far worse cinematic incarnations of Stoker's tale than this — but it must rank as one of the dreariest adaptations ever — a toothless bore shorn of any frisson of eroticism, with nary a drop of blood in sight."