I was questioning who directed this move (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Troll Hunter) and who wrote it (Bullet Train). Are these the same people? Because I enjoyed their previous work, but I am left baffled by this uninspired, painfully average flick. Demeter's fateful journey to England is one of my favorite parts of Dracula: the limited set, the foreboding storm, the crew that is picked off one by one by an invisible force. This movie has no idea what makes horror effective beyond cheap jump scares. What makes Dracula so much more effective, is that the monster is not a generic creature, but a supernatural man of ancient power, mystery, intelligence, and menace. All of that is lacking in the movie. The characters are also not very compelling, and have very limited backstory of no impact. I feel like everyone involved was assigned homework they didn't feel like doing, so they slapped together his mediocre piece. Too bad because I had high hopes, considering my love for the original material. Also, the dog dies, and I don't like it .
Such an average movie. Like... I don't even know what to say about it. I mean the weather effects were kinda cool?
Story wasn't really there, and the monster was never really well-defined nor was it scare or cool. It's just there.
One of my favorite 70's mini-series as a kid was Martian Chronicles. I had just finished Ray Bradbury's book back then (1979), and I was "in the zone" the first night that the haunting theme composed by Stanley Myers came out my little TV (as a kid I had a B&W 12" General Electric portable TV that my grandmother gave me as a gift so I could watch series at night while lying on my bed). The story was a huge departure from the book, but I was thrilled, and hugely dissapointed that it was only 3 episodes long. Over the years, I have bought this series several times (Betamax tapes, VHS tapes and the infamous Collector's Edition DVD, and also the soundtrack CD from MGM Music), and today had the chance to enjoy it in 720p, in one sitting. It looks fantastic. The budget was spent in the main cast and locations, and very, very little in visual effects (as usual in most of BBC's fare of the late 70's), and the end result is fairly decent, with only a HUGE, AWFUL, BAD VFX shot in the third episode that even as a kid made me laugh, and a few matte paintings that aren't that good here and there. The sets, props and art design are early 70's top of the line (it was shot in 1978), some of them as good as anything NBC or BBC had on the air back then. The idea was that keep the story and message clear, despite the obvious flaws. The Martian props are just amazing, and I've been looking for Martian Conflict Masks since. As a modern viewer, you'll need to look at this show with you suspension of disbelief mode fully active (the sky is blue, there are clouds everywhere, water canals and more importantly AIR, on Mars), and take the astronautics "science" with it huge grain of salt (that part of the show was crap even then). You have to, in order to enjoy a great cast, a thoughtful narrative and an excellent ending.