Shadow of the Vampire

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, eerie and well-made.
Review: Right from the very first few frames, Shadow of the Vampire is a gripping drama with terrifying characters and very black and sly humour. The film carries itself excellently and goes at a great pace. The script is very careful and clever, and written with ultimate style and sureness for itself. The acting is very impressive with John Malkovich in a good role with a bad accent and Willem Dafoe, giving an almost legendary performance of an updated version vampire we all know too well. Direction and cinematography satisfy, although the moody blackness of the film sometimes darkens it a little too much so we have to look very hard to see what's going on. Kudos to the makeup artists for fantastic face detail with Willem Dafoe's character. The actor is unrecognisable and the makeup is brilliant. The scenes I really loved in this movie were the conversations with Malkovich and Dafoe. They are extremely powerful and the two actors have great chemistry. There is one extremely eerie scene with the two when Malkovich jumps on top of Dafoe and Dafoe's vampire smiles spookily at him, giving us and Malkovich's character the ultimate creeps. That scene will definitely send a chill down your spine. I also enjoyed the scenes when the crew was shooting Nosferatu, and Eddie Izzard's quiet large cameo. I recommend this movie mostly for people who have seen Nosferatu and really appreciate films and don't mind the odd boring bits. I'll admit sometimes I was a bit slouched from the uninteresting parts, but the film has highly entertaining and intelligent scenes it totally makes up for it. Shadow of the Vampire is a gem and it will appear on many critics' top 10 list of 2000, I'm sure!

Rating:
Summary: Not what I had hoped for
Review: I wanted badly to love this film, and all the elements were in place: I love the original Nosferatu, I loved the remake which starred Klaus Kinski. I adore Willem Dafoe and am always riveted by John Malkovich. The film co-starred the insanely brilliant Eddie Izzard, as well as Udo Keir, Ronan Vibert and Cary Elwes, all of whom did their best with what they had to work with. SotV is beautiful to watch, the idea fascinating. So what went wrong? Why, in the end did it remain so uninvolving?

In spite of performances which are almost universally wonderful - even brilliant in some cases - character development is, at best, heavy-handed. In some cases, it's non-existent; poor Cary Elwes has so little to do it's almost embarrassing. The pacing and editing all serve to create a kind of silent film within a talkie atmosphere which never quite works. We listen for story clues that are not found in the dialogue, look for them in the visual shorthand which is as strange as it is unexpected, and the tension between the two flattens this film pretty comprehensively.

Perhaps this requires more than one viewing, I don't know. I just know that as much as I looked forward to it, I found it impossible to love this film. And given the talent and the ideas here, that's just a pity.

Rating:
Summary: Great idea ruined by a talentless director
Review: A brilliant idea, a brilliant cast...and then comes director E. Elias Hemorroid to lend it absolutely no sense of drama or tension. Still, a fascinating failure that deserves cult status.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely my Favorite vampire movie!
Review: First of all I must admit I don't much care for most vampire movies -- different reasons for different ones. But this one I just loved! Willem Dafoe was SO camp as the very creepy looking vamp, and you could tell he was enjoying the heck out of his role. That makes it really good, when the actor is really enjoying playing a Creep. Also, the whole storyline and cinematography, other actors, screenplay, everything was just Excellent. I don't give many movies (of any genre) 5 stars, but this one I do. Awesome!!

Rating:
Summary: Shadow of the Vampire
Review: "Shadow of the Vampire" is a cute, fictionalized story about the making of F. W. Murnau's silent classic "Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror" (German, 1922). The premiss of "Shadow..." is that Murnau, in his quest for ultimate realism, hires a real vampire to play the part of an actor (named Max Schreck) playing the part of the vampire. The fact that the real Max Schreck, who played the vampire in the original silent film, was always in character and makup during the entire 1922 production makes the premiss of "Shadow..." that much more plausible (if you consider a real vampire to be plausible).   On the whole, "Shadow..." works very nicely. The period cars, trains, costumes and scenery are right on, and the actors certainly do a commendable job, especially Willem Dafoe, who plays Max Schreck. The down side is that in order to fully understand and appreciate this movie, you really should see the original silent "Nosferatu" first. Therein lies the rub. In my book, the original is a five star classic (and my favorite silent movie), and it's difficult not to compare the two. However, it is still very enjoyable and certainly worth seeing.

Rating:
Summary: Why?
Review: Willem Dafoe was great in this film, but that's as far as this good review goes. Maybe, I just didn't "get" what they were trying to do with this film. The story seemed extremely underdeveloped and was very rushed toward the end. Like the entire film crew suddenly realized that they had drug their feet during filming and had 10 minutes to tie it all up. Nosferatu was brilliant, and this almost downplays it's brilliance.

Rating:
Summary: A film you can't miss.
Review: Before we start, let's talk about the film's plot. This film takes place in 1929, were there filming the classic film, Notferatu(I think that's spelled wrong). The gut has hired a REAL vampire to play the part. What he doesn't know is that the Vampire is really evil and planning to kill the entire cast. I thought this was a great film because it makes you think thjat this actully happend. Yep not joking, you forget this is just a film some times. I thought Notrferatu was cool in this film. If you liked the classic film Notferatu, you'll like this film!

Rating:
Summary: Why?
Review: Willem Dafoe was great in this film, but that's as far as this good review goes. Maybe, I just didn't "get" what they were trying to do with this film. The story seemed extremely underdeveloped and was very rushed toward the end. Like the entire film crew suddenly realized that they had drug their feet during filming and had 10 minutes to tie it all up. Nosferatu was brilliant, and this almost downplays it's brilliance.

Rating:
Summary: It's all about Willem Dafoe.
Review: What a great idea for a screenplay: What if the slightly mad German director of a legendary vampire film insisted on casting a real bloodsucker for the lead role? Sadly, the director has limited skills, and the supporting cast is just so-so. But, Willem Dafoe more than makes up for these flaws with an astonishing portrayal of an ancient, cranky vampire who is vain enough to want to be a movie star, and ordinary enough to be willing to suck the blood out of ferrets in return for being the center of attention on a movie set.

Is Dafoe's performance Oscar-worthy? I think so. It certainly is better than some of the mediocre performances that have won of late. The script is strong, as well, and the cinematography is beautiful at times.

Rating:
Summary: great acting, but incompletely developed ideas
Review: Hmmm. Interesting film. Like many pieces of art that thinks about art, it gets a bit idea-ridden. But the thoughts are interesting, and Dafoe's performance as Schreck / Count Orloch is something divinely weird. Here is a movie with a genius makeup artist, who manages to re-create the vampire of Nosferatu (no creepier vampire has ever been shown on screen, I think) with exactitude . . . and Dafoe gives him PERSONALITY! It's not just the pity-the-monster pathos, though that's beautifully touched on when, alone in a cave, he begins reading from Tennyson's 'Tithonus' . . . "The woods decay, the woods decay and fall / the vapors weep their burthen to the ground / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath / and after many a summer dies the swam.../ Me only cruel immortality consumes. . . " but the absurdity of his situation. He has read Dracula, he says, and finds it sad, because the poor count has no servants, and has to be seen by his guest serving the table, making up a meal he cannot partake. He feeds like an old man pees, he says, all at once or in drips. He ghoulishly stuffs down a passing bat like a Circus geek. He snorts and sniffs like one so long alone has has forgotten to have normal manners. After rudely smacking his lips feeding greedily on the desired maiden (no maiden indeed!) he snores in piggy satiation. He is awful and repellant, and very, very funny at the same time. Malkovich's Murnau is a little less of a delight. The whole idea of his character--one so obsessed with creating immortal (or should we say undying?) art that he is willing to expose his cast and crew to the depradations of the real vampire thing, is a sort of mad scientist joke that has all the manifest and hard-to-believe stupidity it usually does in the old horror flicks. He keeps cranking away at the camera while Orloch snaps necks and sucks noisily on the heroine's throat. He has striven so hard for verisimilitude that he is willing to have a rogue creature on the set, but then he complains peevishly when the count dares to commit a murder in such a way as to spoil the composition in the frame. Still, what he says about art and film is telling, and memorable. The director is meant to show us another sort of monster, I guess--the kind who gets so in the grip of an idea about imitating reality that he wittingly or unwittingly shoots a snuff film. This is a level of irresponsibility it's a bit hard to accept. But then, of course, it's a level of irresponsibility in our minds because we rapidly come to believe that Orloch either believes he is the real thing or IS the real thing . . . and how real is THAT???? Meanwhile the cast and crew continue to accept his unpleasant presence as that of a method actor who takes his art very seriously. It's a clever hall of mirrors in which not all the characters have reflections. The incorporation of footage from Nosferatu is done extremely well and seamlessly. And yes, there is irony in recalling that one of the first things done in film, was to put on deathless celluloid the moving life & murderous acts of the undead.