Episode One
The BBC has brought us a brand new adaptation of one of my favourite novels. They shouldn’t have bothered.
Ten minutes in and we get our first meeting with Dracula through a rip off of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula complete with a very bad impersonation of Gary Oldman’s eponymous Count. By fifteen minutes he’s become Rocky Horrors Riff-Raff. Cut to a couple of nuns who turn out to be Van Helsing and a feeble minded Mina Murray, who later proves to be a complete idiot, quizzing a prematurely aged “Johnny” Harker. Several scenes of said Johnny stumbling around a giant maze of a castle, overtones of Labyrinth here. When our vampire eventually fetches up up at the abbey we are treated to an over long scene where the Van Helsing character, along with her fellow nuns, confronts a completely naked Dracula, who has just emerged from the inside of a wolf. And no surprise there either, coming from the pens of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. And let’s not forget that memorable scene from Silence Of The Lambs which is, literally, ripped off, at the end of the episode.
Episode Two
It went from bad to worse. We are now treated to old Drac alternating between Hammer House Of Horror meets 50 Shades Of Vampire. The whole thing set on the good ship Demeter with the erstwhile vampire seducing, and chomping his way through crew and passengers with gay (and hetero) abandon whilst nun Agatha Van Helsing tries to thwart his every move. He is shot, set alight, blown up and drowned, predictably to no avail. And the final Pythonesque scene with a Victorian Dracula emerging from the sea like a blood sucking Captain Nemo to be confronted by Sister Agatha, a squad of police cars and a helicopter begs the question, why has it taken 150 odd years to arrive on Whitby seafront? I presume this will be answered in the final episode.
Episode Three
We started the final episode with a bit more Silence Of The Lambs with a smidge of The X Files thrown in and a few Dali-esque scenes for “dramatic” effect. And in nearly 50 years worth of visits I never knew there was a secret facility for the study of vampires underneath the visitor centre of Whitby Abbey! Whilst there we discover that Van Helsing has cancer and her blood is poisonous to vampires shown as Dracula projectile vomited his last drink with the aplomb of Linda Blair. Then Mark Gatiss himself shows up, in a predictable cameo performance, as Draculas lawyer, Renfield, snacking on the odd fly whilst spouting vampires rights and freeing him from the clutches of Van Helsing to rampage his way through the clubs and gay bars of London in search of a bright, young, but vacuous tramp, Lucy Westenra. After a night of partying and flicking her way through Tinder she agrees, via her irresponsible friend, to meet old Drac in a cemetery at the dead of night. Well, what girl wouldn’t? Cut to the cemetery where 50 Shades Of Undead meets Night Of The Living Dead, with the most diabolical dialogue ever as Drac seduces poor unsuspecting Lucy into being his go to nocturnal beverage. And, days later, when he’s done with her, she is cremated, against Dracs advice, to the strains of Robbie William’s “Angels” before returning as undead but horrifically scarred from her ordeal by fire. We are treated to a long, supposedly moving scene, as indicated by the soaring orchestral music and dire overacting, where she realises what has happened and begs her old friend Jack to kill her. Which he does with a handy wooden stake he just happened to bring with him. The final scene is truly ridiculous. A now dying Van Helsing, who has had a long dreamtime conversation with her dead ancestor Agatha the nun, pulls the curtains down and exposes him to the sun, which doesn’t fry him to a crisp, then proceeds to taunt him because she can die and he can’t and that is what he really wants. Long shot of Dracula pulling all sorts of faces as his expression changes to show us that Van Helsing has hit the stake on the head. Fade out on a final tableau of Dracula supping the contaminated blood of Van Helsing.
There is enough blood and gore to do a Clive Barker movie justice and enough hammy acting for a Hammer House Of Horror production but lacking the finesse of either. If this is what the writers were aiming for they sadly missed their mark. I stuck it out to the bitter end, but the plot, the dialogue and the acting became increasingly unbelievable. Bad dialogue and acting aside, what I find most unconscionable is the complete disregard for the original novel. This is not Dracula, this is a piece of drivel masquerading as Dracula only by its use of the names of the main characters. If the writers wanted to write a modern vampire story they should have got on with it rather than butchering someone else’s work. Ah, but then, it might have got lost in amongst the plethora of vapid vampire/werewolf/zombie programmes which already infest our viewing hours. And if you’re asking why I watched the whole thing, I wanted to see how far down the barrel the writers would sink. I think I have my answer. Shame on the BBC for producing it.