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"The remainder of the evening is cocktail party haze. No one and nothing much else gets a look in. Save Winona Ryder, who moseys up with her younger brother, Uri, both of them teenagers, who together blow a duet of praise in my stupified direction about Withnail ,their compliments as remote from the encounter of the first kind I had just had yet , at the same time, they were doing exactly what I had just done to Babs. Then Winona gets very grown-up and serious about my being in Dracula. I tell her that I met Francis some time back and haven't heard a peep since. Although she looks like a 'child-woman', with perfect pale skin and jet hair, her self-possession is awesome. When she quells my doubting with, 'YOU ARE GONNA BE IN THIS MOVIE,' I believe her."
Extract from The film diaries of RICHARD E. GRANT
published by PICADOR 1996. Copyright Richard E. Grant 1996.
With a knowing wink in the direction of its cinematic forebears, Coppola's 'Dracula' swiftly erupts into a joyously camp Gothic spectacle.
There's something for everyone here. Film bores will revel in all the cap-doffing to German expressionist cinema; slumming intellectuals can pontificate at length about Freudian imagery and bloodlust in the age of AIDS; and connoisseurs of overripe dialogue should prepare for a good few belly laughs.
When Vlad (Oldman) returns from an impaling frenzy in the 1480s, he finds his Great Love (Ryder) has thrown herself from a Transylvanian turret thinking he's perished in the heat of battle.
The most overtly erotic 'Dracula' since Ingrid Pitt haunted the Hammer graveyard back in the 70s, Coppola's version is little more than nominally true to Bram Stoker's text, chucking in plenty of humour and state-of-the-art effects for the 'Evil Dead' generation.
History will probably deem it spectacular but inessential in comparison to Herzog and Murnau, but it's bloody good fun all the same.
review by Robin Askew
