Van Helsing, Schmutz-Spotter!

 Further to last night's Question One, I really enjoyed Big Faced Frank Finlay's first appearance as Van Helsing here in this BBC adaptation from 1977, (which is hopefully where this video starts). His bedside manner's very convincing. He feels like an actual doctor, which makes the vampirism all the more convincing as a disease. There's a lot I liked about this adaptation, which I came to via this piece in The Chiseler praising the focus given to Judi Bowker's Mina (and I bet you money Mel Brooks watched it). As the Count, Louis Jordan gives the impression that he at least thinks he was perfectly cast, which might be all one needs, it's certainly all he needs, and the cutting-edge, nineteen-seventies video effects used sparely, but unahsamedly, to signal Dracula's reality-fracturing otherness is a pretty good match for the proto-modernist surrealism of Stoker's book. The only real problem is its fidelity to the source, a problem no adaptation I've seen has managed to solve. Cure's aren't thrilling. So the opening's superb - staying at Dracula's castle is a hard episode to get wrong - and the fall of Lucy is similarly gripping - there's no obvious nod to The Exorcist, but attention has clearly been paid - but once Lucy's "saved" there's no escaping the fact the climax is a band of heroes who all get on chasing, basically, just a box, accompanied by a heroine who needs to lie down a lot, which is hardly Jaws.

 "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Nice ship you've got here, gents. 

Shame if something... happened to it." Count Dracula

  And I haven't seen the final episode of the latest BBC Dracula yet, but given that the first two roll out the usual Gatiss/Moffat triumph-of-the-will pissing contest between intellectual bullies whose every move is nevertheless either two steps behind the audience or too stupid to have been entertained, I'm not gagging for more. I mean, I'm honestly sure Mark Gatiss is a properly lovely man, but everything he writes suggests someone who loves the past without being remotely interested in history, and it's hard not to feel right now that that's making the world shitter.