When Dracula leaves the captive Jonathan Harker and Transylvania for London in search of Mina Harker—the spitting image of Dracula's long-dead wife, Elisabeta—obsessed vampire hunter, Dr. Van Helsing sets out to end the madness.
Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.
Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.
70
The New York Times
Vincent Canby
Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.
It's sexy and bloody and, to my amazement, R-rated, but in a stylized, Grand Kabuki manner that lifts the action (including the sex and violence) from our normal sphere of reality to the realm of timeless, primal tales.