Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

jacobjohntaylor1 This is a great movie. This version of Dracula is the closed to the book. It is best on one of the best horror book ever. So it is one of the best horror movies ever. It is very scary. A r.o.m.a.n.i.n vampire movie to England to find new victims. This movie has a great story line. It also has great acting. It also has great special effects. If you do not get scared of this movie. Then no movie will scary you. This is a classic. Louis J.o.u.r.d.a.n who play the part of Dracula also played a Bound villain. In O.c.t.o.p.u.s.s.y staring Roger More. He did a great job in this movie. B.o.s.c.o Hogan who play the part of Jonathan H.a.r.k.e.r was also great in this movie. B.o.s.c.o Hogan was also in King Arthur.

wparlette It is near perfection. The acting along with the eerie music make this a movie to remember as I have since a child. As I mentioned up top in the summary, the silly looking bat props are a serious flaw but otherwise there is nothing to fault. In fact, the effects that are used are quite good despite being simple(mist, negative film images, etc.) I just finished watching it a short while ago after 30 years. Without trying to sound cliché, it was like reliving a memory. Now that I have it on DVD I can go back again and again...at least until I get sick of it. I note there are other reviewers who also, as I do, can't figure out why this movie didn't have more staying power than it did.

theowinthrop I have a problem with the classic horror story "Dracula". It is, without a doubt, one of the best researched horror stories of all time - everything we generally know about vampires comes out of it's pages, because Abraham "Bram" Stoker spent years researching it before it was written and published in 1897. Stoker was actually a part-time novelist, and worked usually as theater manager for the great Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. This explains the paucity of his number of total novels (roughly seven) in a thirty year career ending before his death in 1912. That said, my problem is that his strengths as a constructor of plots and of researching an arcane area of occult knowledge are not matched by a serious key to being a novelist: being readable. Of the major occult novelists, only the American Charles Brockden Brown can create such lugubrious prose (but to be fair, every now and then both Stoker and Brown let down their halting prose styles and relax enough to write something truly haunting in terms of dialog).Because of his weakness I only half enjoyed Dracula the novel. I was thrilled by the circumstances he set up in his tale of the blood - driven Transylvanian Count, but I hated reading his dialog because his characters are so stiff. Therefore, when others are critical of what is cut out of some of the film transitions of his stories (such as the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi film, based on the play Lugosi starred in) I find that the cuts are welcome as enlivening the work for the screen.Lugosi's performance has been called one of the great "operatic" performances captured on celluloid. That is Lugosi captured the grandeur of his twisted nobleman with that impeccable old pedigree - he made that cape of his seem as natural as the wind. It remains a great performance, even as we realize it is has become a source of jokes and spoofs (best seen in Mel Brooks/Leslie Nielson's "Dracula: Dead And Loving It").But for my money, the best performance of the role was done in this 1977 British production (shown that year on Masterpiece Theater) that starred Louis Jourdan in the title part. For the first time the role was not just purposely making the Count sinister and grand but good looking as well. Jourdan, impeccably suave and handsome, looked like he could charm a woman into a fatal tryst with him. In a way this production mirrored the nearly contemporary Broadway revival of the old play that starred a young, good looking Frank Langella as a sexy Count.The story was better told than the movie versions - they included the subplot about the American Quincy Morris (Richard Barnes) who is a rival of Jonathan Harker (Bosco Hogan) for Lucy Westenra (Susan Penheligon), and while Morris's character was combined with another minor figure it retained it's importance, as well as it's sad fate (at the conclusion Dracula is able to kill Morris before he is destroyed). On the other hand, the script writers got rid of one annoyance in the Stoker version: Morris is supposed to be an American from Texas - he sounds like he never was within two thousand miles of Texas.Jourdan did some nice tricks with the aid of the director, including one thing that was not done in any of Lugosi's: he is seen at one point climbing the wall of his castle to come into the window of Renfield's (Jack Sheppard's) room. Done slowly (Jourdan is heard creeping before he appears on the wall) it was a genuinely unsettling moment, especially as Jourdan is shot from the head down. The beast-nature of the Count was never quite shown that way before. As his opponent, Abraham Van Helsing, Frank Finlay gave a good account of that master skeptic - skeptical of dismissing "old wives tales" because there may be some truth to them. His handling of the unfortunately necessary destruction of Mina Westenra's (Judy Bowker's) Vampire infected corpse was far more realistic than the versions in Lugosi's film involving Edward Van Sloan in that same role. Mina is aware here of what Van Helsing is doing, and part of her senses it has to be done to free her soul.It has not been seen for decades, and hopefully still exists to be viewed again. If I only give it a "9" it is due to my problems with that novel as a novel, not with this series.

ashley wetherall The 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula is without a doubt the very best version filmed so far. Many Dracula fans may say that the hammer version of the story is better. But for me this is the one. I first viewed it when it was broadcast in 1977 in two parts and I have seen it many time's since. I didn't know it back then, not having read the book as I was only 6 years old ,but it was and still is the most faithful version of the story. Most of the actors look like the have stepped from the pages of the Bram Stoker novel with the possible exception of Louis Jordan's Count, who is suave and elegant until his blood lust is aroused. This is also the first version to show some of the more horrifying moments from the novel, such as the brides and the baby. Plus many of the actual locations that appear in the novel are actually used. There are a few minor draw backs in the BBC version but they are mainly to do with the budget restraints. For example some scenes' are filmed in video and some in film giving it an uneven feel and some of the special optical effects are very dated. But if your like me you can forgive these. To finish off all I can say is that I wish Frances ford Coppola had watched this version before he started filming his rather disjointed , overblown 1992 version. The 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula is a master class in how to bring slow burning Victorian terror to the screen.