Review – Dracula (1979)

The setting may be turn-of-the-century England, but the plot, characters, and even some of the costumes are pure disco. Frank Langella stars as a smarmy, big-haired version of the infamous count, hamming it up in a performance that ranges between campy and grating. The story is Stoker’s, only it seems to have been run through a blender so the original characters play different parts in this tale and the original settings provide backdrops for all the wrong scenes. And to cap it all off, the effects are genuinely wretched. For example, Drac’s seduction of Lucy is accompanied by disco lighting so awful even ABBA would have been embarrassed by it. Maybe big vampire fans might enjoy this more than I did, but just about everyone else can probably regard this as little more than a historical curiosity. See if desperate