Product Description A 1979 re-imagining of the tale of the thirsty count Dracula (Frank Langella) sees him the only survivor of a ship gone aground off the English coast. His intention is to take over Carfax Abbey and to that end he's brought his own soil with him from Transylvania. Making friends with the locals goes well until a young woman dies through loss of blood and all is suddenly not as it should be. Laurence Olivier plays Dracula's nemesis, the vampire hunter Van Helsing. Amazon.co.uk Review Chalk this one up as something that seemed like a good idea at the time. Frank Langella had just taken Broadway by storm in a revival of the play based on Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel. He was tall, elegant, and almost painfully romantic--all qualities that failed to translate to this garish, tarted-up film version. The story remains the same, if told in greater length than in Bela Lugosi's version. The film even offered Laurence Olivier as vampire-hunter Van Helsing (in one of several roles he played during the period that required a middle-European accent) and a young Kate Nelligan as the woman whose love (and blood) Dracula most wants. But director John Badham, working from W.D. Richter's clunky script, makes a hash of most of it, relying on special effects to do the heavy lifting. -- Marshall Fine

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