12. Jack Palance in Dracula (1974)
Jack Palance performs Vlad Tepes as a delicate insurgent with a style for revenge to go together with his bloodthirst. Sure, he hisses, snarls, and bares his fangs, however doesn’t chew till bitten. Then he can trash a tomb like an outtake from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Palance cuts a effective determine in a black-on-black ensemble, with a midnight cape overlaying. This higher frames him in opposition to the picturesque nighttime gardens, doorways, and arches the place he most frequently seems.
Dracula (1974) director Dan Curtis was no stranger to vampires, inventing the gothic cleaning soap opera with Darkish Shadows, which he adopted up with a sequence of TV motion pictures based mostly on basic horror novels. Written by Richard Matheson, the scriptwriter for The Night time Stalker, Dracula condenses Stoker’s novel right into a tragic romance, with a love story that transcends demise. Within the Curtis model, Lucy (Fiona Lewis) is the reincarnation of Dracula’s misplaced bride, who he items with everlasting life and the promise of higher nights. It’s solely after she’s staked that he units his sights on Mina and people chargeable for the tragedy. The Impaler is impaled on this story, and the irony isn’t misplaced on the viewers.
11. George Hamilton in Love at First Chunk (1979)
One other fly by evening character, George Hamilton appears too tan to play a bloodthirsty reanimated corpse. His Depend Vladimir Dracula by no means drinks… wine, doesn’t smoke… shit, and has been going round trying like a head waiter for the previous 700 years. However with out him, Transylvania could be as thrilling as Bucharest on a Monday evening. His individuals tortured and murdered harmless peasants to clear the land, which makes it his. So when the Communist authorities of Romania converts Fortress Dracula right into a gymnastic camp in director Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Chunk (1979), Dracula and his cockroach-eating manservant, Renfield (Artie Johnson) e book lodging in New York.
Hamilton’s Dracula enjoys himself immensely, each the actor and the character, who loves every thing America has to supply, colourful discotheques, versatile intercourse golf equipment, and simply robbed blood banks. Richard Benjamin performs Dr. Jeffrey Rosenberg, a distant relation of Dr. Van Helsing, as a schmendrick psychologist who can’t maintain his horror lore straight. He shoots Dracula with three silver bullets, which solely works on werewolves, and brandishes a Star of David, reasonably than a crucifix, on the undead man about city. The mysterious vampire remains to be a romantic at coronary heart, and when he turns Susan Saint James’ Cindy Sondheim right into a creature of the evening, he vows no quickies, all the time longies, and an eternity of sleeping in.
10. Carlos Villarias in Dracula (1931)
Whereas Bela Lugosi was making cinematic historical past by day in Dracula in 1931, Carlos Villarias was placing a sizzling Latin spin on it after hours. The Spanish-language model of the horror basic was shot on the identical units after the American model shut down for the evening. Blood on a price range. It’s a vampire custom.
Carlos Villarias is an attention-grabbing parallel to Lugosi. Romantic, lusty, his eyes disrobe each lady he is available in contact with. He desires to suck one thing, however a neck must do within the early thirties.
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