The K.I.S.S. of Dracula. (a review)

The warning signs were in front of me before I even ventured in. I had witnessed, with my own eyes, flashes of the horror that would await me and yet I was nevertheless compelled, lured in by my own ennui and sneering complacency. I was not some naive Victorian Lawyer like Jonathan Harker, stumbling into a crumbling castle, wide eyed and ripe for squeezing, as I say, I saw the signs well in advance, and knew what fate would befall me, even managing to put it off, for a while, but the draw of The Count is too strong, his influence so potent that in the end I succumbed. And so it was, with a sense of knowing dread that I stepped over the threshold and into the world of Gatiss and Moffat's resurrection of Dracula.

I would have been a fool to have expected they would have not defanged the Ghoul. After all, these were the fiends who had butchered Sherlock Holmes as thoroughly as Jack the Ripper had Mary Kelly. Stealing from the great detective something that had remained in all previous iterations of the reimagined sleuth. I knew that in their attempts to be clever, they would reveal, yet again, how little they understood that character and how much they'd pat each other in the back for their daring reinvention. Like Frankenstein they had, in their own hubris, already cobbled together an unwieldy, horrific and yet ultimately pitiful monster. It was not enough to merely raise the dead, no, that , would be too simple. They had to show what artistes they were, revealing to the world a squalid, patchwork facsimilie of the master detective, his soul wrenched from him and replaced with their demonic voices.

Nevertheless, I steeled myself and set forth. I found myself pleasantly surprised at first as I witnessed a haunted ghoul give his confession to two nuns. They had ruined poor old Jonathan Harker, but in a good way, a satisfactory way, as he gave his account, first hand, to a rather glib sister of the cloth. The Nun's attitude troubled me, but I was too rapt by Harker's story of his own damnation, brought to life exquisitely by the damned crew who had been tasked with bringing this dreadful conjuration to life. How could I not suspend disbelief as I wandered the shadow-choked halls of Dracula's labyrinthine castle, feel a familiar tingle in the back of my neck as spiderlike fingers crawled across the dusty decrepit bannister as Claes Bang's manifestation of the Count was revealed as a half-remembered ancient wraith, radiant with potential malice. This narrative played out much as would be expected, at first, but behind this facade I could see glimpses of the rot that threatened the entire premise. Within the space of an hour The Count had been transformed from desperate atrophied leech to a villian who would not have seemed out of place in that perpetually miserablist circle of hell, that doldrum of haunted mundanity known as Albert Square. I recoiled from this gruesome sight, fearing that as bad as this horror was, I would be ill-prepared for its subsequent atrocity.

Oh, dear reader, how right I was. For it was here that the hapless necromancers Gatiss and Moffat took it upon themselves to play with the entrails of Dracula for the first time. Harker is revealed to have become an undead thing, which itself was nothing too surprising, but then it is revealed that our smug wife of Jesus is none other than Agatha Van Helsing and that her partner, who has sat silently weeping for most of the confession is none other that Miss Mina Murray, the former protagonist of the original novel, now reduced to a simpering oaf. I could barely watch as the heart was ripped out of the character, reduced by their foul artistry to little more than a Macguffin, so that the Count, could lay seige to this nunnery, for reasons that elude reason. All that Mina was had been transferred, in an act of blasphemous vampirism, to Agatha Van Helsing. The rest was a perfunctory horrorshow and in the end I was left, hanging from a cliff, wondering if it were not better that I jump, before I was pushed. There was worse to come, much worse.

Before I could think I was pulled into a new episode, an odd verbal battle of wills between Dracula and Van Helsing wherein Chess is used as an artifice, just to show how clever these two are apparently. This conceit would have been interesting if the Chess game had been relevant to what followed, but unsuprisingly that was it. Chess equals clever in the mind of these reprobate thaumaturges that is all that mattered. I am treated to what seems another confession, Dracula's travel to Cornwall aboard the Demeter. It is true that the undead aristorcrat does indeed travel this way to England in the orginal book, but it is a slight thing, it's horrors mostly left to the vivid imagination of the reader. However if I have learned anything from Gatiss and Moffat's past dalliances into revivifying the icons of the past, they do not care about that. To them the imagination of the reader or viewer is secondary to their own venal entertainments. And so it is I set aboard the Demeter knowing full well that this incident in the book will be stretched past the point of tolerance and indeed it transpires as such as Dracula now little more than a blood drinking bovver boy with some remnants of sartorial elegance, spends the next hour and a half in what is essentially a “spam in a cabin” slasher movie, as one by one he slaughters a cast of inclusivity tokens. It must be said that there remained some moments of delight, or dread, but it was as unsatisfactory as Dracula dining on seagulls. After one and a half hours of this, I want to jump overboard, but Agatha Van Helsing, who, for reasons that elude reason, has been kidnapped by Dracula and kept aboard the ship, as nibbles, while he gorges himself upon the rest of the crew. In the end those who survive scarper on a lifeboat, while both Agatha and the Captain of the demeter set up a non-cunning trap to blow the ship up. Which they do, not before Count Geezer has jumped into his makeshift coffin.

At the end of this tragic farce, he emerges from the dismal brine onto the shore in front of a ruined Carfax Abbey. Cocksure and drenched, he is greeted by Van Helsing and a team of mercenaries all holding guns, a helicopter hovers overhead and it's searchlight illuminates the dread Count. I feel like crawling into the ocean myself to save me from the inevitable ghastliness I know awaits me.

And yet… like a victim held in thrall by the wiley blood-drinker, I sleepwalk, eyes wide open, into the oncoming train-crash. For over a century The Count lay in a state of dormancy under the water? Let it be known here that I for one know that Dracul is dragon and that dragon once represented giant sea monsters, so the Cthulhu parallel could have been interesting to play with. There is nothing so bold, but hic sunt dracones, nevertheless. Dracula has returned in the here and now and after a tussle with the thoroughly modern Miss Van Helsing, scoots off into a house where he marvels at the luxury of a normal family, one of whom he has stuffed in a fridge, just to remind us how dreadful he is, though his bit of social commentary is more effective in that regard. The mercenary forces along with Van Helsing storm the suburban hellhole and capture Dracula just in time to be introduced to a spectacular array of glitter idiots, who in some measure are simulacra of others from the novel, vapid hollow doppelgangers replacing somewhat less empty Seward and Westenra. While it is true that Lucy Westernra was indeed a simpering victim within the contexts of that original dread text, here she is a narcissistic nihilist. Gatiss, as ever, cannot help insinuate himself in his own fantasy, this time as Renfield, one of the most interesting characters within the original novel, but here, merely a vehicle for Mark Gatiss' own pleasure. Renfield is Dracula's solicitor who frees him from the clutches of Jonathan Harker's foundation, set up by Miss Mina Murray, who you may remember from Dracula as the main force that binds all the other agents together in her attempt to thwart the Count, or from this as a weeping nun who appears for ten minutes. Now free, Dracula seduces the Selfie-queen Westenra as Van Helsing begins dying of cancer. For reasons that elude reason, she drinks a test-tube of the Count's blood. Poor Seward, who is besotted by Lucy realises something is up. He worked, briefly for the Harker Foundation shown as him and others watch footage of the count who has not aged in his watery grave despite not having been drinking blood, which was clearly established in the first act. At this point could anyone have expected better? Like a surly innapropriately aged couple of surly Goths, Dracula takes Lucy on a late night date to a graveyard, has a quick snifter of her and then, she falls ill of his sickness.

Seward recognises the mark of the vampire on his neck and rushes to find Van Helsing who, having imbibed the blood of Dracula now has access to the original Agatha Van Helsing, who long dead, still retains her smug demeanour. Like the immortal surly teenager he has become Dracula turns up at Lucy's window and drains her dry. Exit Miss Westenra. This is fairly close to the novel but what comes next is the final wade through the slurry of bad ideas so dreadful that I feared my cringing would have been enough for my sphincter to crush the Koh-I-Noor diamond. After her cremation Lucy somehow returns and makes for her new boyfriend's fancy bachelor pad. Meanwhile the anodyne Seward and dying Van Helsing find the Count's whereabouts since his phone number is registered. They turn up for the final confrontation just prior to the Lucy Barbeque beast, who seeing her reflection thinks she is an immortal beauty, after complaining bitterly about how hard it was to be pretty, she seems delighted by this, for reasons that elude reason. We reach the crescendo of this particularly unexquisite corpse. Horrified by his well-done paramour Seward kills Lucy after she is not pleased with her last selfie. Dracula is mildly perturbed by this affront and Van Helsing demands Seward leave, so she and the Count can resolve their differences. Seward leaves, she jumps on the table and pulls the curtain down (ahem). The sunlight does not incinerate the Count. No, instead Van Helsing reveals Dracula has existed in a state of denial, that he is attracted to death because he is too scared to die. Stunned by this glaringly obvious revelation of his fundamental motivation, he pounces on Van Helsing to drink her corrupted blood, knowing it will kill him. The two die, as they make love in the heart of the sun, for reasons that elude reason.

Now one could look at the meta-context of all of this, expound upon the trilogy slowly deconstructing the myth, point to signifiers of the script itself vampirising the original novel in an attempt to re-contextualise the blah de blah blah blah. In fact I have structured this rant in a similar way to the way their script restructed the novel, not because I'm big and clever, but because it is easy, and it is atrociously lazy. I am not going to criticise the actors, the editing, the set design, the score, nor the cinematography because they were all of a far better standard than this excremental outpouring deserves. This was a squandered opportunity to revitalise a classic for the post-modern age. In fact, Gatiss and Moffat's ham-fisted attempts to make it post-modern were exactly what made it such a squalid insult to all involved, including the viewer. So much money time and talent went into this and it was all wasted, pissed away so they could indulge themselves with something that they assumed had merit but made the Twilight series look profound. Both these gentlemen are exceptionally talented, but also, it appears, exceptionally arrogant. There was nothing new, nothing bold, nothing transgressive here, it was an insipid travesty. They were far too self-congratulatory too hung up in trying to be novel that they forgot the golden rule, keep it simple, stupid. What a wasted opportunity.