Word: langella
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...FIRST FIVE MINUTES of the new Dracula, Frank Langella literally rips out a man's throat, and you know nobody's gonna pull no punches this time. Let the tide of bloody dead babies commence: let there be impalings, gougings, slashings, stakings, necks broken with an appetizing CRRRUNNCHH in Dolby stereo, John Williams conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, repeating the same goddamned nine-note musical motif like a lobotomized organ grinder, bats tearing faces and crucifixes burning the flesh of latex-scarred vampirellas. "It's a love story," explained Frank Langella...
...odds with director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) from the beginning--"What do you need blood and gore for? You've got me. What do you need other actors for?" But he was overruled, and as technicians plastered the sets with spider webs, large rodents and decaying corpses, Langella retired to his dressing room with his Barry Manilow and Kiss records "to put me in the mood for the love scenes...
...which reduced the play to the dimensions of cardboard. The most effective scene in the production--even though it was completely inconsistent with the tone of a 30's movie--was an erotic, sado-masochistic seduction of the ingenue by Count Dracula. The production had one indisputable asset: Frank Langella, the most endearing, cuddlesome teddy-bear Dracula ever to pierce a jugular...
...their makers sought to keep belief alive despite the strictures of the budget. And mind, this leaves aside discussion of higher levels of creativity that have occasionally been placed in Dracula's service: the stylish camp of the 1977 Broadway production, from which this film has borrowed Frank Langella for the title role, only to tune him down; or the wonderful expressionistic grotesqueries of that marvelous silent, Nosferatu...
...Dracula remains forever undead is that no amount of cinematic miscalculation can entirely loosen his grip on our imaginations. Now he has proved that even an excess of good taste cannot entirely ground him. Not permitted to parody romantic menace as he was able to do on the stage, Langella shows himself capable of playing it straight and slightly melancholic. Kate Nelligan, as Lucy, the young woman who enthralls him and is herself enthralled, is superbly spirited. In the film's early scenes, she plays the part as a liberated lady, turn-of-the-century variety. Once Dracula...