Poorly written. poorly directed, poorly acted, absurd, pretentious, snails pace garbage. Only redeeming feature was Kinski. Hence the second star.

So Jonathan spends 4 weeks to reach Count Dracula's house so he can sell Count a new house but when Jonathan finally arrives, he sees a bald, pale white guy with long claws and Jonathan has zero reaction to those long claws on Count's fingers. Hmm, interesting.Jonathan is sleeping in Count's house and Count walks inside the room and tries to... scare Jonathan? Or something. Their acting is HILARIOUSLY awful. They act with zero emotion. I was not buying anything they were doing.Oh and you got to give credit to the makeup artists. I love how Count's face is pale white but his neck is much darker than his face.And when Count is inside a coffin, how the fvck does he get all those men to transport all the coffins when Count is inside one of the coffins the entire time? After Lucy gets bit in the neck by Count and Count dies from sunlight, Van Helsing goes upstairs with a stake to make sure Count is dead and Jonathan shouts out "Help!" inside the house and some cop shows up. Hmm, I guess that cop had some super hearing ability or something. The cop says to Van Helsing "Did he kill the Count?" Van Helsing says "Yes." Cop says "Arrest this man." LMAO! That is some top notch acting right there.And omfg, that short guy who would laugh nonstop like a goddamn retard is so fvcking annoying. I really wanted to stop watching the film because I could not stand his laugh. I really don't know why this movie is considered to be a "classic" or even "beautiful" lol. I guess people have weird tastes.

I'm not a film buff or anything like that, so I feel completely unqualified to talk about this beautiful movie at length. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting details relating to its production, actors and shooting locations - things infinitely more compelling than who is sleeping with who in Hollywood, which is what people seem to be more interested in.The scenes in the countryside and the mountains seem so real that they might be a documentary - not actors, but Werner Herzog knocking on the door of a building he thought was beautiful in a remote village somewhere in Romania or Bulgaria and filming the lives of the people who happened to open the door.The scenes in Dracula's - uhh... I mean Orlock's - no wait this is the movie where they actually call him Dracula - Dracula's castle are eerie as anything I've ever seen. Imagine being trapped in the middle of nowhere in that stone ruin, at the mercy of that *thing* that dwells there...Which brings me to Klaus Kinski. What an actor! I've seen him play Jack the Ripper and Aguirre besides Dracula, and he is always menacing, always a real presence, but in this movie he is hideous, inhuman, an albino bat that truly threatens your life. The scene where he approaches Jonathan after he accidentally cut himself gives me chills - Dracula's inhibition, Jonathan's terror, the shadows...The movie is spectacularly beautiful. The sea is a presence, as are the mountains, and the beautiful European city of Delft where the movie was shot - though it is said to take place in Wismar - but most of all the darkness and the shadows. The vampire sits in the shadows, unmoving, for a long time, until the shadows move and reveal his pale face, a face out of nightmares.

I found this film to be a bit of a mixed bag. It has many strengths - thick atmosphere, haunting score, great cinematography, fantastic locations and great set design. Most of all, Klaus Kinski is mesmerizing as Count Dracula. He has such a strong screen presence and everything about him - the way he moves, speaks, stares - it all just works and feels very compelling. He steals every scene he is in to the point where many of the scenes without him feel dull by comparison.And I hate to use that word - dull - but for some reason I couldn't shake it from my mind for some sections of this movie. The pace is slow and brooding, which is something that I tend to like. A lot of my favorite horror films are slow and deliberate, The Shining chief among them. But it's all in the execution, and here I found the slowness to be a bit burdensome. The movie can come off as wooden at times. Apart from Klaus, the acting can be a bit questionable as well, especially with Lucy's character. I'm sure she is just following direction from Herzog, but I found her to be a little blank and unconvincing, which is a pretty major issue considering she is meant to carry essentially the entire second half of the film. There are also some moments that play as hokey: all the members of a bar turn in unison and gasp at the mention of Dracula, characters read aloud about vampires from a book when no one is around etc. However, the scenes that work, absolutely work (and they uniformly involve Klaus). It's worth seeing for those scenes and the nice atmosphere, but I don't think it's a film that I'll be hurriedly returning to any time soon.