Dracula 2000 (2000)

Risen by elaborate means from a treasure vault in modern-day America, Gerard Butler's Dracula is an almost entirely non-verbal ponce whose exhilaration at the sight of ripe virginal necks looks like constipation, but this Wes Craven-endorsed exercise in horror, featuring Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing descendant, Jonny Lee Miller as geeky-chicy muscle, and Justine Waddell as a woman with a supernatural bond to the ancient bloodsucker, is so-bad-it's-not-so-bad mindless horror-action fun.

★★★☆☆

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Dracula Untold (2014)

If they'd dispensed with the tired false promise of that title and marketed it as a live-action Castlevania, maybe more people would have enjoyed this origin story that melds together the mytholology of the world's most famous nocturnal neckbiter, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, with the history of the 15th Century exacerbater of the Ottoman Empire, Vlad the Impaler even if the movie does rely a little too often on its swirling cgi bats and even if, like the film's antihero, the film refuses to die despite several ideal moments when it should impale itself on a stake and end but instead rises diabolically again and again and again (each time with a swirl of bats) because the gap between history and mythology that the film is bridging is actually a chasm with nothing in it, one that requires at some point just a stupid leap.

★★★★☆

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Francis Ford Coppola's ludicrous, outrageous Dracula story is buoyed by Gary Oldman's gleefully grotesque portrayal of the 400 year old count who floats around with a disembodied shadow and an ability to transform into green mist or a writhing mass of rats, and the movie's Giallo horror stylings help present a world so reminiscent of the book that this really does feel like it is Bram Stoker's Dracula and not just another camp monster cliche.

★★★★☆

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