TheRetroCritic

So you've got Christopher Lee playing Dracula, an actor with one of the most amazing, most sinister voices in cinema history, so what do you do?  Make him play a wordless, lumbering drone!  Although it was Lee himself who refused to read the lines he was originally given, a rewrite would have probably been a better solution as the lack of lines really takes a lot away from the character. He is still somewhat threatening but just feels altogether pretty bland and lacks the presence and style of Bela Lugosi's original Dracula . Can you imagine if Saruman just walked around saying nothing in the Lord Of The Rings movies? People (and hobbits) would just give him weird looks and ignore him like some crazy hobo wizard. By showing a recap of Dracula (1958) at the beginning of the movie, Dracula: Prince Of Darkness really makes you miss that film which had the ever brilliant Peter Cushing as vampire hunter Van Helsing. The plot is typical: English tourists ignoring vil