Argento’s Dracula 3-D an Undead Travesty
Dario Argento is a legend. Let’s just get that out of the way right up front. He, along with some his fellow Italian brethren like Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, helped change the face of horror as we know it, their ‘giallo’ movement one that has influenced numerous filmmakers all across the globe for almost four decades now. He is the mind behind triumphs like Inferno, Deep Red, Phenomena and, of course, Suspiria, and as such genre Argento is a genre giant who sits in the pantheon as one of the great horror directors to ever step behind a camera.
PHOTO: IFC Films
Even so, nothing could have prepared me for the director’s Dracula 3-D, an unbelievably awful adaptation of the immortal Bram Stoker tale that puts my undying affinity for the filmmaker to a major test. With production values appearing less than that of a random, low budget SyFy Channel effort and featuring performances the less said about the better, this production is inept in ways that simply boggle the mind. As excited as I was to get a look at this film, as happy as I am to give any Argento effort an exuberant, wholehearted chance, the director’s latest is arguably his nadir, and if this is the best he can do at this point sadly maybe it’s time for him to consider retirement.
That’s honestly a little overly harsh, and in all fairness I’m letting my disappointment get a little bit of the better of me. Problem is, Argento’s latest is still shockingly bad. While good actors like Thomas Kretschmann (Dracula) and Rutger Hauer (Van Helsing) initially appear to be perfectly cast in their respective roles, and while the director’s daughter Asia Argento, playing the ill-fated Lucy, has been just fine in film’s as diverse as The Last Mistress, Marie Antoinette and Land of the Dead, they all look just as lost and ill-prepared to act their respective roles as the remainder of their lesser known costars do. In fact, the only actor to make it out of this mess relatively unscathed is Italian beauty Marta Gastini, her performance as Dracula’s object of desire Mina Harker not so much exemplary as it is charmingly passable.
PHOTO: IFC Films
But the rest? It’s an unintentionally laughable mess. Never shocking, never scary, never sexy and sure as heck never showcasing a shred of imagination, the movie falls to pieces right from the start. While Argento’s attempts to blow apart Stoker’s story and go his own way with it is laudable, the fact he and his creative team don’t do a single solitary interesting thing in regards to these oftentimes massive changes most certainly is not. There is no emotion fueling the melodrama, the inherent passion at the heart of Stoker’s story all but nonexistent. The final narrative is a bizarrely incoherent yet also annoyingly impassive farce that’s close to unwatchable.
I respect and admire Argento way too much to beat a former maestro into the ground for his recent, and apparently getting more and more frequent missteps, and I continue to keep hoping that at some point he’ll return to form. But as mediocre as The Mother of Tears and Giallo were, this adaptation of Stoker’s classic makes them look like the second coming of Suspiria and Inferno in comparison. Argento’s Dracula 3-D is pretty miserable, and if the director intends to rise from the grave and return to relevance this is one motion picture that’s needs to be forgotten about as quickly as possible.
Film Rating: ½ (out of 4)
