Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

2002 silent vampire ballet

Rating: 16/20

Plot: It's Dracula but with a lot more dancing. Oh, and the titular vampire is Asian or, as people in the late 19th Century would say, Oriental.

It's shane-movies favorite Guy Maddin with his take on Bram's vampire tale, and if you like silent movies and ballet, you're bound to love this movie. Or if you're a fan of Maddin's neo-silent style and unique visual flair. This one's all about the flair really because the Dracula thing doesn't do a whole lot for me. Either Guy Maddin puts a tremendous amount of time and care into constructing each shot (and there are a lot of shots in this one--there are action sequences where things whip by at such a frenzied clip that it makes you old school dizzy) or he's some kind of savant. Creative set design, all those obscene camera angles that are all the rage, and experimental flashes of color make this one a visual stunner. Yes, there's plenty of ballet dancing, but it never gets in the way of the story and doesn't seem all that stagy to me. And mercifully, they dance in snippets generally with only a few longer numbers. And thankfully, though the story's obviously stuffed with a lot of dark vampire-on-vampire action, you still get some of Maddin's dry humor, especially in the use of words that appear on the screen. At least I think those are supposed to be funny. If not, then I feel bad. I really wasn't looking forward to this one, probably because I thought it would be more this than this. That and I didn't want my readers to accuse me of jumping on the vampire bandwagon. But like the rest of this guy's stuff (love that pun!), this is an idiosyncratic treat!