Dracula (1992)

Saw this for the first time for the dubious reason that I wanted to see Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which is a direct parody. I wasn't expecting such a larger-than-life, hyper-exaggerated psychosexual fairytale.

The lavish production design is amazing. (Apparently much of the mood was based on Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and it shows.) Dracula's armour is iconic. But everything else also feels exaggerated to excess. The gratuitous nudity is right out of a late-night erotic thriller. Critics singled out Keanu Reeves's dreadful English accent, but it's really no worse than Anthony Hopkins's hideous German one. Gary Oldman as Dracula and Tom Waits as Renfield stand out as much more compelling, but both performances are so very big that they're impossible to take seriously. That lavish scenery must have been delicious they chew on it so much.

It's obviously exaggerated on purpose, but I couldn't help but draw negative comparisons to the last big-budget fantasy I saw, The Northman, which is also larger-than-life but in a way which is still immersive rather than distancing. I think part of the problem is that Coppola's film might be the very last fantasy blockbuster to completely eschew the use of CGI, which makes it look older than it is; apparently they even used multiple exposures over blue/green-screen compositing. Most of the in-camera effects are charmingly, distractingly obvious -- for example, it was almost entirely shot on soundstages, so shots that would've been better on location (such as train exteriors) are quite obviously using miniatures. There's some interesting framing specifically to force perspective, but I found it so hard to suspend disbelief that it was more interesting as a production novelty than engaging as a story.