Tag: Dracula

Monday Morning Movie Review: Dario Argento’s Dracula (2012)

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Dario Argento is one of my favorite giallo directors.  The man’s name is synonymous with Italian horror, and he is probably the best known giallo director of all time, at least here in the States.

So when I saw he directed a film based on Dracula, I got excited.  I figured it would be a masterpiece of giallo styling against the classic story.

Instead, Dario Argento’s Dracula (also known as Dracula 3D; 2012) is a hideous abuse of CGI—and, I suspect, of Argento’s name to sell some tickets to a crappy movie.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

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It’s been a big moviegoing summer for yours portly, and I’ve availed myself of the offerings at my local cinema quite frequently.  While I was still on summer vacation I managed to slip into a 4 PM showing of The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), a film about the doomed ship that carried Count Dracula to England in the original Bram Stoker novel.

I was hoping for a delightfully blood-soaked (and blood-thirsty) romp on the high seas, blending the manliness of stoic sailors in the waning days of the Age of Sail with the Gothic horror of old-school Dracula.  Instead, I got a disappointingly plodding film and a stomach ache from eating too much popcorn, albeit with a pretty terrifying depiction of the dreaded Count.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Boys from County Hell (2020)

The Portly Politico41 Comments

Today is my birthday.  I’m thirty-seven today, and am on the downward slide towards forty.

But even on my birthday, I must deliver the goods.  Since it’s Monday, that means a movie review, and this flick is really quite fun.

The film is Boys from County Hell (2020), a comedic vampire movie that takes place in rural Ireland.  My family and I had the opportunity to visit Ireland in 2006, and the film’s setting really reminded me of that trip.

The premise is straightforward:  in the small, dying town of Six Mile Hill, there is a stone cairn in the middle of a farmer’s field.  The cairn is said to be the grave of Abhartach, an ancient Irish vampire who is said to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The cairn—indeed, the entire town—is threatened by a proposed new bypass.  The bypass will route so much traffic away from the town, it will kill the struggling local economy.  Naturally, the construction will also move directly through the cairn.

You can probably see where this is going.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

The Portly Politico11 Comments

I’m coming off a dizzyingly long Thanksgiving, and while I enjoyed quite a bit of unstructured time, I surprisingly did not have much time for writing.  Posts from the past week indicate the amount of phoning in I’ve done lately, and this week’s Monday Morning Movie Review will likely be no different.

The idea for this review came from my good buddy photog over at Orion’s Cold Fire.  On Halloween he wrote a large double review of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu and the Werner Herzog remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

After reading his review, I found that Shudder had the Herzog remake—which photog correctly identifies as a tribute to the 1922 F. W. Murnau film—and watched it.  I will say that photog’s review really does an excellent job of detailing the highlights, so I’d encourage you to read it.  As he goes through much of the plot, I’ll leave that alone, and instead will give some of my thoughts on the film.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Dracula (1931)

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My local library has been screening the classic Universal Monster Movies every Saturday night this month, which is just about the greatest thing any library has ever done (besides, you know, storing all of that knowledge).  They kicked off the month with 1941’s The Wolf Man, but I think they saved the best for last—1931’s Dracula (this weekend they’re showing a non-Universal Monster flick).

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Comic Review: Dracula: Vlad the Impaler (2021)

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This past weekend I went to Athens, Georgia, with my girlfriend to see the sights.  We spent a good bit of time in downtown Athens, near the University of Georgia campus, which was overrun with graduates and their families in town for a weekend of graduation ceremonies.  Amid our sightseeing, we stumbled upon Bizarro-Wuxtrey, a comic book and record store that truly lives up to its name.

The first floor of the shop is Wuxtrey Records, a record shop that, due to Virus-related capacity restrictions, we were not able to browse.  The second floor is—like Bizarro Superman—the comic book section.  It was the classic comic book store, complete with an overweight, older gentleman with long hair and a beard manning the shabby little counter.  The store features several rooms of comics and old magazines, including back issues of old niche magazines dedicated to sci-fi flicks and movie monsters.

Amid the stacks of new arrivals I found the subject of this post:  the black-and-white reissue of the 1990s graphic novel Dracula: Vlad the Impaler.

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