Okay, this isn't your usual summer blockbuster. It's got next to no action, no sex, no fights, no explosions, no blades, no chases, no violent personality conflicts... What it has is death. All these images, rythm, musical background (a hypnotic, eerie score by eclectic german band Popol Vuh) and themes are about death, oppressing death, and how it wins in the end.Even Adjani, most beautiful woman in the world at the time and today still, looks like an incarnation of a melancholic death, a ghost held up by pure emotions alone, a pre-raphaelite image of sadness and perfection. The creature itself, an avatar of death rather than a super-powered gentleman, expresses pain and solitude, stuck in timeless half existance and despair.With him, death journeys toward the protagonists' home, borne on a ship manned by the dead, bringing with her infertile soil, pestilence, confusion and finally, acceptation; The dance of the dead in the city's streets may have been one of the most intense cinematic experience I witnessed at the time, and today still I am filled with emotion as I recall the last meal, and the tranquil acceptation of inevitable death.I do not easily give scores above eight, but this was something else, and the memory of a grainy, slowly flying bat, without malice or even intent, coming down on an eerie, hypnotic musical background, as being the very image of death, is in my mind on this day still. Such images are what cinema is supposed to provide us with.

One of the most boring movies ever. I fell asleep at least 6 times. Oh and that guy's laugh is SOOOO annoying

at the first sigh, the version of Dracula by Herzog. in fact, a fascinating parable, in which the Georgian music, the rats, the performance and face of Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski remind old fashion manner to create the mystery and tension, the streets, the people, the homage to Murnau masterpiece , the delicate science to create and explore the details. in essence, an impeccable show. like an embroidery. because this is its purpose - to tell a story, to use all the opportunities of a meet, to remind recent history, to put the known symbols in a new context, to use slices of romance and horror for rehabilitation of Gothic literature. it is not a film of a story but the film of mysterious, seductive, almost hypnotic images.

This movie has a lot of rough edges and no decent climax. Kinski as Dracula works well, as does Isabel Adjani as Lucy. But the blocking of the camera is amateurish, the perspective is confused, and worst of all, it's the only vampire movie that doesn't scare anyone. (Oh by the way, if you are on the way to driving a stake into a vampire's heart, don't appear in the next scene with the stake in your hand; you are supposed to leave it in.)Herzog has said that this movie was an attempt to show the highest values of his own culture. I have no idea whether he succeeded, but as a movie, this is a failure.