According to Variety (via Ain't It Cool News), there's yet another Dracula movie in the works. This difference between this one and the thousand others before it is that it's been Officially Sanctioned by Bram Stoker's estate as a sequel to his novel.What's confusing to me is that Ain't It Cool News also calls it an Officially Sanctioned sequel to the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie. That doesn't make any sense because the Lugosi film was based on the stage play version, which differed radically from Stoker's novel. And the Lugosi film was set in the 1930s, while the novel is Victorian. This new film (called The Un-Dead, after the dropped sub-title to Stoker's novel) could be the sequel to one version or the other, but not both.
It reminds me of Boom! Studios' claim that their War of the Words: Second Wave comic picks up "where the novel and all the other adaptations – the movies, the radio show - left off." It's just not possible once you realize that the novel and it's various adaptations all take place in vastly different time periods. But I digress.
At any rate, the fact that the Stoker estate likes it is good news. The fact that the director is Jan de Bont may not be such good news. He did Speed, which was a good action film, and Twister, which was an okay action film, but he also did Speed 2 and the Tomb Raider sequel. His only horror directing credit is for the remake of The Haunting with Lily Taylor and Liam Neeson, and that doesn't bode well.
2 comments:
Not sure what the point is in calling it an official sequel, with so damn many sequels, remakes and rip-offs over the decades.
Plus, isn't Stoker's DRACULA in the public domain? And how much you wanna bet if this gets made, THE UN-DEAD will be altered to include DRACULA somewhere in the title?
You're right. Take away the estate's endorsement (and I don't even know who's running the estate) and it really holds no more value than Dracula 2000.
Less, actually, on account that it probably won't have Christopher Plummer.
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