Wednesday 27 January 2010

Rise in glory ?


I hate to be the bearer of potentially bad news but it has just been announced that AVATAR star Sam Worthington will be the latest of a long line of actors to play Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. Why bad news? Well, look at the guy! What is more worrying is that the film, which is to be directed by Alex Proyas - who brought us DARK CITY and I AM LEGEND - and which will be called DRACULA YEAR ZERO refers to Dracula in the press release as a "romantic anti-hero". I'll repeat that, "A ROMANTIC ANTI-HERO" which rather tends to tell you where this film is going. Romantic? Well, there is often a tendency to emphasise romance of sorts in vampire films and I'm sure that it is no coincidence that this film comes along at the height of the TWILIGHT frenzy but I have a yearning for the the path rarely taken where vampires belong to the Max Schreck fan club and have bad breath and rat-like qualities - think of the wonderful Radu in the SUBSPECIES series. We've had romance before and it was done fairly well in both the Langella and Oldman interpretations but let's either get back to basics or...and here's a thought...why not get Frank Langella back to play the Count as written by Stoker? I suspect that Proyas is going back to Vlad the Impaler and the origins of Dracula and that may be a good thing. We'll see.

1 comment:

Cerpts said...

Oh jeez....

Actually that whole Langella idea strikes me as really interesting. This Avatar actor, however, leaves me at the dock after the Demeter has set sail. If it IS made, however, at least it will be apropos for a vampire movie to SUCK!