
Dracula (1979) had been dismissed by my dad as not very good (hence not worth watching) but since it just came out on dvd and i'm interested to see this story as many times as possible i decided to watch it anyways. for the first 15 minutes of the movie, i was really enjoying it. john williams score! great sets and costumes, seemed like a different approach starting the movie not in transylvania, but on the boat over to england. and then, frank langella finally showed up as dracula and all the anticipation/fear disappated immediately and the movie just sunk. i guess i would have to compare it to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which seems like its almost great but is brought down (for me anyways) by one factor: robert deniro as the monster. it just doesnt work, and thats not to say that i dont like robert deniro or think he can act, but just that he was fatally miscast and the movie never had a chance. same story here. langella was all wrong for the part (in my mind although apparently he was successful on stage doing it which won him the role), but is too romantic and cheezeball. his hair was too feathered, his costume did not look very good, and he just didnt work. so, despite some cool roles given to donald pleasance and lawrence olivier the movie just didnt work. it was cool to note some of the shots/scenes picked out by coppola in his version of dracula a decade or so later (climbing down the building, lighting the cross on fire), making that just a great amalgam of all the draculas/nosferatus of the previous filmed versions. (i love that film). also, a lot of the movie seemed to deviate from most versions, like was jonathan with mina or lucy? who went to transylania? which one does drac bite first? anyways...
Zombie, my first lucio fulci film which is apparently an unauthorized sequel to Dawn of the Dead. for those of you who watched Jaws and then watched Dawn of the Dead and thought 'man it would be cool if a zombie fought a shark', then this is the movie for you! haha, actually there is a lot of grisly zombie death and gore in this and if you liked dawn of the dead, this is very similar although involving a voodoo curse on an island apparently bringing people back as zombies. very similar in tone to the hopeless apocalypse of romeros films but without much humor.