Product Details

• Actors: Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant
• Directors: Francis Ford Coppola
• Writers: James V. Hart, Bram Stoker
• Producers: Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Mulvehill, Fred Fuchs, James V. Hart, John Veitch
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
• Subtitles: Spanish, Georgian
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: September 7, 2004
• Run Time: 127 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (629 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 0800177177
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,569 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Bram Stoker's Dracula" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

With dizzying cinematic tricks and astonishing performances, Francis Coppola's 1992 version of the oft-filmed Dracula story is one of the most exuberant, extravagant films of the 1990s. Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, as the Count and Mina Murray, are quite a pair of star-crossed lovers. She's betrothed to another man; he can't kick the habit of feeding off the living. Anthony Hopkins plays Van Helsing, the vampire slayer, with tongue firmly in cheek. Tom Waits is great fun as Renfield, the hapless slave of Dracula who craves the blood of insects and cats. Sadie Frost is a sexy Lucy Westenra. And poor Keanu Reeves, as Jonathan Harker, has the misfortune to be seduced by Dracula's three half-naked wives. There's a little bit of everything in this version of Dracula: gore, high-speed horseback chases, passion, and longing.

From The New Yorker

The filmmakers can't put this fiasco off on poor Stoker. What makes the picture so peerlessly ridiculous is the style, not the story. The screenplay, by James V. Hart (co-author of "Hook"), embellishes a simple, classic tale with killer-diller thrills and special-effects opportunities; and the director, Francis Ford Coppola, executes every dreadful idea with ferocious, near-fanatical enthusiasm. The movie is an orgy of fake blood, opera-house décor, and delirious film-lab wizardry, and it sustains a hysterical tone for an ungodly two hours and ten minutes. It's conceived as a vampire saga in the modern, eroticized manner-horror to make women swoon like Victorian maidens-but it isn't very scary, and it isn't romantic. Gary Oldman, who plays Dracula, is perfectly opaque and remote in the seduction scenes: he has no sex appeal. (As the old Dracula, leering wrinkedly beneath a crullerlike coiffure, Oldman has his moments, though.) The picture just keeps coming at us indefatigably, unstoppably, as if it were pursuing us through eternity, and it leaves us feeling mysteriously drained. This is no ordinary movie: it has the appalling persistence of the undead. Also with Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

141 of 158 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually, I come down on this as James V. Hart's "Dracula", October 22, 2004

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Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bram Stoker's Dracula (DVD)

"Bram Stoker's Dracula" or, more properly, "Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula"? The assumption was that the title was chosen to stake a claim to being the film adaptation closest to Bram Stoker's original gothic novel, but the reason was more mundane. Another studio had the rights to the title "Dracula," so a qualification was necessary. Since this 1992 horror film would have the same characters along with the same general plotline as the novel, this seemed reasonable enough. But screenwriter James V. Hart added a significant element to Stoker's novel that justified the movie's potent tagline, "Love Never Dies." As director, Francis Ford Coppola provides the stylistic flourishes, which are this movie's best parts, but Hart is the one who is responsible for the derivations.

In the novel Count Dracula only makes vague reference to the historical Vlad the Impaler, son of the prince known as Dracul (the Dragon), hence the name Dracula (son of the Dragon), when he tells his guest Jonathan Harker of the history of his family. Hart takes advantage of what we know about the historical figure to craft the film's prologue. Vlad (Gary Oldman) is fighting the Turkish invaders, not simply as a prince of Wallachia, but rather as more of a true Christian knight. He succeeds, but the exaggerated rumor of his death reaches his beloved Elisabeta (Winona Ryder), who throws herself to her death from the castle walls. As a suicide she cannot be buried on consecrated ground, and an outraged Vlad renounces God and is somehow transmorgraphies into a vampire as a result of his blasphemy. Then we get to the beginning of the novel.

Harker (Keanu Reeves) is traveling to Transylvania to Dracula's castle to complete a series of real estate transactions that will allow the Count to come to London and live in style. Something not very nice happened to the previous member of Harker's firm to make this trip (can you say Renfield?), but the old Count only seems eccentric. However, when he sees a picture of Harker's fiancée, Mina Harker (Ryder), the Count knows that she is the reincarnation of his beloved Elisabeta. Now Dracula has reason to not only travel to London, but to make himself young again so that he can woo his woman.

Once we move from Transylvania to London, we meet the rest of our cast of characters. Mina's best friend, Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), is being courted by Dr. Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), who runs his own little asylum, Lord Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), a handsome nobleman, and Quincey P. Morris (Bill Campbell), who hails from the American West. However, before Lucy can choose from amongst her beaus, she becomes the new bride of Dracula instead. Fortunately, Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) knows more about medicine than what is found in science books and knows what is to be done in this situation. Meanwhile, Count Dracula manages to run into Miss Mina, and the seduction is on.

The production design on this film is fantastic. When it first came out on DVD I would use it as a prime example of what could be down with sets and decor: Thomas E. Sanders and Garrett Lewis were nominated for an Oscar. The film won Oscars for Eiko Ishioka's Costume Design, and the Makeup of Greg Cannom, Michèle Burke and Matthew W. Mungle, as well as the Sound Effects Editing by Tom C. McCarthy and David E. Stone. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus deserves to be mentioned despite similar notice. The bottom line is that this is a great looking film, which is one of the things we come to expect in Coppola's work.

Oldman's performance as Dracula is interesting. Given all the actors who have come before from Max Schreck and Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee and Frank Langella, it is hard to stake out new ground in the role. But Oldman bases his characterization on not only the romantic but also the tragic elements of this particular Dracula. Unfortunately, the performances of the cast are the weakest part of the film. Reeves is far and away the most wooden, but Ryder does not create a woman worth waiting for as far as I am concerned, which is the true weakest point of the film. Hopkins follows Laurence Olivier in the Van Helsing role and in a similar vein creates an eccentric ethnic know-it-all who spends a lot of time basically telling the gang of fearful vampire slayers to shut up and do what he says.

When "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is over you will be struck by how gorgeous the film is from start to finish. That will make up for so many of the actors being as wooden as the stakes used to dispatch the vampires. Hart's twist on the tale helps improve Stoker's original ending, which was basically a race to kill Dracula before the sun sets. The tragic element established by the prologue is adequately played out in the ending. This film might be another example of the triumph of style over substance, but given the depths that some vampire movies can reach, it is nice to have one that aspires to such artistic pretensions.

104 of 119 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We are all madmen for God", November 23, 2002

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Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bram Stoker's Dracula (DVD)

When I first saw this film I was completely carried away with Francis Ford Coppola's dark and brooding presentation of the novel that created the modern vampire. The visual composition, the use of color as theme, and the music overloaded my senses to the point that I barely noted the movement of the plot. After all, I had read Stoker's tale often enough to recite it word for word. Why pay too much attention? Going back over the film 10 years later revealed much that I missed the first time.

Of course, the film really tries to capture the feeling of the book rather than be a literal copy, which may bother some aficionados. Coppola has chosen to gradually shift emphasis from a horror tale to the tragic story of an impossible love, without ever losing either thread. By shifting Dracula (Gary Oldman) back and forth from Rumanian hero to terrible monster, and allowing each persona to have its emotional context, he forces a foreboding dilemma on the viewer. Dialog and narration is sparse, just enough rather than florid. Again, nothing is allowed to distract from the building tension.

What completely escaped me on the first viewing was Coppola's vision of a creeping corruption that infects almost all of the characters. British social mores fare little better than those of the vampires. Jack Seward (Richard Grant) is a morphine addict and Lucy Westenra's (Sadie Frost) sexual intensity proves her Achilles heel. Even Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) is subject to eerie, almost degenerate moments. This is a less pure, more disturbing world than that of Bram Stoker's imaginings.

Coppola keeps the film working on many levels - foreboding horror, grand romance, sharp social commentary, and transcendental morality play. If love redeems, it only does so at a terrible price. Well worth viewing - several times.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gary Oldman makes this movie work, July 29, 2000

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Shelley Gammon "Geek" (Kaufman, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bram Stoker's Dracula (DVD)

Not since Bela Lugosi has there been a Dracula this sexy, handsome, ugly, lovelorn and pure evil at the same time. Whether portraying the young count in the 16th century or playing himself as a late 19th century ogre of a man with a big white bufont hairdo (with a handsome window's peak to boot) and Edward Scissorhands fingernails, Oldman makes this film what it is. His acting is exquistite as the tortured soul who longs after his lost love and lusts after the taste of human blood.

Post-Lagosi vampires in cinema have always seemed to get the best of the good guys, but in this film taken from Stoker's 19th century novel, good does triumph over evil. Copola endeavored to stick with older cinema effects and he did a superb job. There are some scenes that you will never forget ... a marriage between simple effects and creativity gone wild... especially when the elder count's shadow acts on its own accord. More suave than gory, but there is gore... this is the best production of the tale of Dracula since the invention of color film. If Anne Rice's spin on the vampire tale is more your speed, this film will probably not be up your alley. Violence and sexual inuendo make this a film not suitable for kids.