All in all, it was not a bad film. It compares well with the entire Dracula genre, which is not exactly great, comparatively speaking.

it is an amazing movie if you consider it stars Keanu yet you keep forgetting that every time until the intro credits appear

man I love Keanu

Like so many of Francis Coppola's movies, I wanted so badly to like this movie because of all the things that were amazingly good about them, but God was it difficult.

It worked well as an adaptation of the book until Coppola foolishly decided to turn the story into some kind of shit analogy for AIDS or whatever and ruined the entire creepiness of the Dracula character by making him a romance novel character instead of a horrible elderly man who uses his dark powers to make women think he's wonderful, which is far more disturbing. But, Hollywood...

The pace of Coppola's version was dull and I found the actual narrative of the film to be disastrous especially around when Drac started courting Mina and all of that 'lost love' claptrap.
Plus the decision to turn Dracula into a cross between Lord Byron, Heathcliffe and some kind of shape-shifting FX non-entity was simply baffling.

As far as film takes on 'Dracula' go, I find the 1979 "Dracula" film to be a reasonably satisfactory compromise between romantic gothic and straight horror, and, in particular, Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing was vastly underrated
- the hammy fluttering he does is intially comic, but intentionally so to hide a core of steel. Frank Langella as Dracula provided an interesting interpretation of the Count, in that while he was a glamorous type in some scenes he was also undeniably a monster. Though the climax was somewhat limp and lacking energy and Trevor Eve as Jonathan Harker was less than impressive.

I actually read the original novel, and it was the most butt-boring thing in the world. How do you even do a story about Dracula and leave the reader falling asleep? But chalk that up to Victorian storytelling sensibilities, and the fact that I wasn't the intended reader, who would find the very notion of a Balkan vampire exotic and shocking. We're so far past that these days that I'd rather watch a film with an actor portraying another actor who used to portray Dracula, coping with poverty, drug addiction, and the relative success of a limey cocksucker.

The Coppola version kept to the original in broad strokes, but added the romance angle and a secret origin for Dracula, neither of which was a bad idea. The big problem is that Coppola otherwise respected the original material.

Normally I have nothing against Ishioka but in this case, in this film, the costumes are one of my least favorite things about a movie I don't care much for at all. The costumes are all exactly what movie costumes shouldn't be, unless your movie's about clothes: showy and pretentious and harboring a nasty tendancy to draw attention to themselves.