Dracula (1979)

“Oh, I loved to be frightened..”

This was the last of the famous Dracula films I’d seen and, while it doesn’t rival the recent BBC TV series, it’s easily the best cinematic version of the original novel, excellent though some of the others have been.

This film is, strictly speaking, based on the play written in the years after the novel was published but, despite skipping the famous Transylvanian bit, and with those inevitable lines "I never drink wine" and "Children of the night, what (sad music they make" present and correct, this is broadly very faithful to the original epistolary novel- not without changes but preserving the core of the story, namely Dracula coming through the window to threaten first Mina and then Lucy.

There's no downplaying the original sexual subtext of Dracula drinking Lucy's blood, either: the film is very well-shot throughout but the main scene of Dracula feeding from Lucy is directed in an abstract but obviously sexual way. Plus, of course, Frank Langella gices us a charming and deeply erotic version of the Count, with charisma enough almost to rival the great Christopher Lee.


Laurence Olivier is, perhaps, hamming it up as Van Helsing, although Larry hamming it up is worth a strong performance from a lesser actor. But it's a real stroke of genius to cast Trevor Eve as an appropriately chippy Jonathan Harker, somewhat pissed off at Dracula for nicking his fiancee.

It's also nice to hear Hollywood acknowledging that Whitby is in face in Yorkshire and not the Home Counties, with the not-posh characters having accents to match. It's a nice but crucial detail that is so often forgotten. It may or may not be the best Dracula film, but it's easily the best cinematic version of the novel Bram Stoker wrote.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

”Hello, good evening and welcome!”

“I don’t actually say that...”

For all that Ron Howard is an unflashy director his style certainly works, and his work on bringing this excellent Peter Morgan stage play to cinema is the perfect example. Oh, its stage origins are certainly very obvious, but there’s nothing wrong with that. What matters is the extraordinary performances, with Michael Sheen once again perfectly inhabiting a real figure in the form of David Frost as we know he can, but just as much with the equally sublime Frank Langella, who may not look or sound like Nixon but, for the length of the film, simply is him.

The script is of course superb, bizarre though it is to see everyone’s least favourite BBC director general John Birt as a character in a film. The four interviews are treated and shown as though they were rounds in a boxing match; this film is the Rocky of political interviewing, always reminding us of Frost’s apolitical nature and light entertainment background. It makes for gripping viewing, with high stakes for everyone, and the time just flies by while watching. We see Frost genuinely struggle and Nixon’s confession, when it comes, feels both earned and deeply powerful. The film is a triumph.

Perhaps the true centre of the film, though, is Nixon’s drunken phone call to Frost and the huge chip on his shoulder about his class background that is revealed. Nixon was a fascinating man, a character of Shakespearean depths and an ambiguous legacy, certainly tragic, an introvert in an extroverted profession and, beneath it all, a human being. Sheen may be superb in playing the mannerisms of a talented but uncomplicated man, but Langella deserves real credit for conveying such fathomless depths.

Masters of the Universe (1987)

"I don't like adventures!"

This is one of my absolute favourite rubbish films. Oh, it's rubbish alright. Eternia looks like a cheap set indoors and like Southern California outdoors, but despite this they had to save money by setting it on Earth, which I imagine would be much cheaper. Skeletor's mask looks rubbish, and poor old Frank Langella gets hilariously clichéd lines such as "A curious quartet" and "Gildor, you minute minion". What's an actor to do but ham it up? As for Dolph Lundgren's performance as He-Man… well, the credits show that he needed both a speech coach and a drama coach. 'Nuff said.

I love it, though. It wears its rubbishness with pride, and is full of dialogue that can only be deliberately hammy. The music is so very, very '80s, and so are the hairstyles. It even has James Tolkan in it, the chap who plays Mr Strickland in the Back to the Future trilogy, and he's one of my favourite actors. In fact, he's probably the best thing about this film.

Still… this is a commercial tie-in to the Masters of the Universe cartoon and toys, so we'd best talk about those. It's all pretty much a formative part of my childhood since the age of five, and I can still remember a disturbingly large number of character names. One of them was called Fisto. Hur Hur. Although I'm not sure what the relevance of the phrase "Masters of the Universe" was. It was all just a load of cynical marketing, of course, but we '80s kids lapped it up. The cartoon, which mostly only featured the same few characters, was a good laugh in spite of the recycled animation and plots, partly because of the deeply silly moral homily at the end of each episode. The backgrounds always looked fantastic, almost as druggy as the plot, and set up a very specific visual aesthetic that anchored this odd mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

This film is not exactly a faithful representation, which should come as no surprise; why should Hollywood creative types slavishly adhere to the rules laid down by a range of toys? Anyway, lots of the characters would be impossible to render well in live action on an obviously limited budget; look how rubbish Skeletor looks. I'm sort of glad they didn't try to do an Orko.

The whole aesthetic is different from the cartoon- very much a mix of the standard Hollywood '80s sci-fi and standard Hollywood fantasy. The overall effect is something much darker and less trippy which makes you much more aware of the inherent silliness of names such as "He-Man and "Evil-Lyn" than would have otherwise been the case. Orko is replaced by Gwildor who, as a fairly standard '80s Hollywood fantasy dwarf, is far more budget friendly. And Billy Barty is the second best thing about this film.

Oddly enough, it seems the director, Gary Goddard, was heavily inspired by Jack Kirby's New Gods stuff for DC. I've not read much of that, but I can see how that would have affected the aesthetic and how Skeletor would presumably be a sort of Darkseid figure. More obvious, though, are the suspiciously large number of, er, "homages" to the Star Wars trilogy. Let's look at them, Shall we?

·         Skeletor is accompanied by a load of black, armoured troops that seem suspiciously close to being stormtroopers.

·         The scene with Skeletor inspecting the bounty hunters is suspiciously close to the similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Just using the word "mercenaries" instead of "bounty hunters" doesn't fool me, I'm afraid.

·         The final fight, with He-Man throwing Skeletor down a big hole and the camera following him down for a few feet, is suspiciously close to the climax of Return of the Jedi. Come to think of it, Skeletor looks an awful lot like the Emperor.

That's all coincidence, I'm sure. For the rest, though, we have a fairly standard adventure plot, with the Cosmic Key as our McGuffin. We have Julie (a young Courteney Cox with… interesting hair) and Kevin as our audience identification characters because, obviously, we couldn't possibly be expected to identify with aliens. We have a ridiculously square-jawed, goody-goody hero and a silly, moustache-twirling villain. We have a henchman being zapped to death for failure. We have a silly comedy dwarf. It's all very by-the-numbers, really, but fun, and crammed with action and adventure, up to and including an exploding microwave.

I'm not sure about the ending, though. If Julie and Kevin are a few months back in time, what happened to their earlier selves? Doesn't this create a time paradox so that none of this ever happened? Oh, and if the cosmic key can cause time travel then why didn't our heroes just go back in time and stop Skeletor from doing anything naughty in the first place? Probably best not to think too hard about such things…