Dracula Untold (2014)

[Henry88]

A Hero Turns Evil in First Dracula Untold Trailer
http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/76773/ ... z35cAI6oFW

[lhb412]

Baba Yaga tied in with Dracula's origin? Better have the chicken-legged house.

[tbeasley]

[DannyBeane]

I hope they mention scholomance or have some of the film take place there.

[walshiam]

Looks like a goodie.

[jellydonut25]

Looks pretty stupid, but at least a horror(ish) film is being released in OCTOBER for a change...

[jellydonut25]

So I finally saw this and I'm decidedly mixed on it. They actually did a decent job (FAR better than I might have thought) of getting me to buy into Dracula as an anti-hero, and the skeleton of the story is not too bad (Vlad is shown to be a ruthless warrior who was trained from childhood to be a killer. He's now trying to just live out the rest of his days but keeps getting pushed by the Turks back into being a violent warrior again. He turns to the original vampire, a man who summoned a demon, to give him the strength and obviously there are consequences) but it felt like they knew their premise, knew they wanted it to end a certain way and knew they wanted to set things up for sequels and the future, but had no idea how to get there.

There's a lot of padding in the middle of the movie, which for a 90-minute film makes the whole thing feel woefully underwritten. There's this subplot wherein his whole village is pissed at him for being a vampire and tries to kill him but it's brought up for the first time and dropped within about 10 minutes, just to eat up some space. Also, Luke Evans lacks an ounce of charisma, personality, emotion, etc. He's just there. Probably the least memorable Dracula I've ever seen.

Overall, it's a mixed bag that has me hoping against hope that the new Universal monsters series can be decent. Basically they've swung me from entirely pessimistic to a little more cautiously optimistic. There's OPPORTUNITY here, just learn from the mistakes of this particular film and we could wind up have fun, if a bit dumb, monster movies. I just don't know if they WILL learn from those mistakes, or just keep plodding along.

This is probably a movie I would have thought was pretty awesome around when I was 12-13...so, if that's really what Universal is going for, they aren't totally failing.