Rating: 
Summary: The worste vampire movie ever made
Review: I am not only a huge horror fan but a great fan of vampires. I was very dissapointed with this movie. 3 of us rented it and 3 of us turned it off and left. I tried hard to get into this movie, assuming because of the wonderful cast, that it had to get better. After sitting through an hour of it I couldn't take any more. I was the only one still awake. It put my other 2 friends to sleep. A complete waste of money.
Rating:
Summary: Boring!
Review: Don't waste your time or your money, this movie is not funny or scary or whatever. However, The cast and crew they are good, they should've worked in a different set and movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Shadow of the Vampire
Review: 100%. Few movies are this smart, let alone those in the "horror" genre. Dafoe and Malkovitch both turn in outstanding performances and the idea behind the plot is brilliant, scary and, not least, amusing.
Rating: 
Summary: The Vampire as a baby coming to birth
Review: Few of us will have failed to make a connection between the thirsty vampire and devouring male sexual greed, of sex as a taking, as violent and penetrating, of exploiting and depleting of the female. But this can also be the experience of the mother with the child inside her, and of her child in relation to the foetal environment. This is also likely to be retaliation of the baby towards an environment which increasingly fails it at various points. The wooden stake clasped by the woman in this film could easily stand for the negative umbilical affect, the poisonous feeling-states or chemical toxins from the mother that pierce the baby through the umbilical chord.
The climax of this film comes right at the end, with film crew, cast, new cameraman, and young wife all assembled with Nosferatu on the island of |Heligoland. As he approaches her in the bedroom, the woman sees in the bedside mirror that the vampire has no shadow, so he must be real. Screaming in terror like a woman in childbirth, she is injected with morphine, like the woman in child birth, so that she is barely conscious and unable to resist the blood letting. "He casts no reflection" cries the terrified Greta. For birth is like a black hole. No light can escape it. Awareness is sucked into darkness. The vampire in each of us wants the immortality of never being born. We seek immortality in an imaginary world, mirrored by the celluloid world of film. We imagine that mother earth will never be exhausted by our greed and will always be able to discharge our waste products. We seek to banish our deaths by denying the experience of birth. Even Freud had a terror of outliving his own mother. The vampire now drinks the blood he craves unhindered. Greta is haemoraghing. But the plot of the film makers to deal with the threat of the hungry vampire has been undermined. The film crew, decked out in their white medical coats are now as much obstetricians as cinematographers. Their cervix does not open. The tunnel of light from the outside world remains blocked off. The vampire has cut the cervical chain mechanism that opens the outer doors to the daylight.
The vampire hopes to stay in the dark with his fantasised eternal prize, an inexhaustibe placenta. But as one of the film makers has pointed out, there is no way off the island. There is no fuel left in the plane. The reality is that blood supplies will soon run out. The modern health professionals are gathered at the door with their forceps, taking over the job of the unconscious anaesthetised haemoraging woman. Like the baby stuck in the birth canal, the celuloid film sticks in the camera. Both the film and the vampire are burned to ash by the fierce intensity of the light.
The experience of birth can be like death by burning, unendurable. It is not a coincidence that the wise women who gathered herbs and provided midwifery services to medieval women were the ones burned at the stake for witch craft in medieval, Nosferatu times.
I wonder if the audience of this article can endure to be aware of what I am writing, or whether these words will be eradicated by some editor before they even reach the point of becoming combustible paper. Malkovic, as the film director, declares that he is making this film in the service of science. You and I , dear reader, are no longer to be left chained to the walls of Plato's cave seeing only reflections. From now on we will no longer be able to say that we were not there. We were there at our births. We were conscious, at least to the point when the pain became trans-marginal and our memory became buried in the darkness, though not eradicated. The pseudo-scientific myth makers who affirmed so unequivocally that there could be no birth experiences, because the nerve cells are not yet myelinated at birth, have been exposed as purveyors of intellectual opiates equivalent to the chemical ones used to suppress the mother's and babies experience of birth.
As Herr Murnau winds on the old camera by hand, one is tempted to think of this scene as a masturbatory fantasy, a narcissistic sexual devouring of the mother/Goddess, male revenge upon woman as mother. "In this scene you will make the ultimate sacrifice for love," Murnau tells Greta. This statement is totally inexplicable in terms of pretty young woman and hideous monster. And make no mistake, Willem Dafoes Nosferatu is no tall dark handsome stranger, but a rival to Boris Karlof's greatest performances. It is only in birth that a woman sacrifices herself to great pain for love. Malcovic's face is shown in colour while the vampire and victims are in monochrome. He is totally uninterested in the threat of death to himself or his colleagues at the creatures hands. The vampire has cut the chain which connects the counterweight to the solid portcullis that opens to the outside world and the bright light of day. The humans are locked in with the vampire till he can escape at dusk. He does indeed kill the directors assistants, but in the face of the directors calm insistence, he goes back to complete his part in the script, expiring in the flood of light let in by the noisy rescuers, battling in from the outside world. Just as the light starts to enter the house, the creature gazes into the camera to witness his immortality there. But he is dissappointed. He throws the camera aside and expires in the sunlight. Malcovic exults, "and finally you must turn to meet the sun, the death of centuries. Moonchaser, monkey, blasphemer, vase of prehistory, finally to earth and finally born."
Suddenly the story of all vampires is also exposed to the light of understanding. For this undead, yet forever living creature of darkness, who lives off an endless supply of blood drawn from an artery, is none other than the unborn baby. His existence is none the less precarious, for the supply of blood is not guarrunteed. His greatest desire is for the life blood of the most nubile of women, the perfect child bearer. His deathly paleness is the result of an inescapable placental failure, as he grows too big and too demanding for the dark space he seeks to inhabit forever. The glorious fullness of the outer world is death to the dark secure timeless world prebirth. Murnau concludes the film. "Time will no longer be a dark spot on our lungs," the price of premature birth. We now have "Our very own painting on our very own cave wall. They will no longer be able to say, you would have had to have been there, because the fact is, Alvin, (already killed by the vampire) we were."
We can remember our births. We can remember life before birth. But it is a dangerous journey. It is truly a heroes journey. But The Shadow of the Vampire's only real hero is the author, who has dared to throw light into the darkest hiding places in our culture.
Rating:
Summary: I'll get to liking it another time.
Review: Well, I think that this movie was bad, an Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe) is supposed to actually be a vampire or cannibal or whatever. He doesn't have fangs though, and this movie could have done good if it was called "Nosferatu" and if it followed the same story as the REAL F.W. Marnau's classic Nosferatu. Therefor, this movie gives the real "Nosferatu" a bad name and I think Hollywood should cancel it before anyone else buys it, ....
Rating:
Summary: What, no zeros?
Review: Excellent lighting, great photography and editing, fantastic makeup, brilliant acting and still it's a zero. John Malkovich turns in a memorable performance. Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck is at times truly chilling. In spite of that, if you leave wondering "what the hell was that about", you're with the majority of moviegoers who feel there should also be some sort of plot as well. This is "Porky's Revenge" masquerading as art.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Parts...But "Out of Frame"...
Review: John Malkovich...essaying "madman" Director F. W. Murnau... proclaims at the "maximum snuff"climax of his Monster-from-the-Id production NOSFERATU: "If it's not in the frame...it doesn't exist!" This is my assessment. Director Merhige has filmed MIRAGE not a movie. His effort is, indeed, a shadow. Sometimes less is not more. Reviewers applaud fine acting; eerie sets;and tremendously effective art direction. The meld-seque photography...with interspersed frames of the silent film classic....is often startling. But that's also the point. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is a consummate example of PM Deconstructionist Self-indulgence/Self-homage. Startling is the intention of pornography...not art.In my estimate SHADOW is intellectual pornography. The hedonism clip in the film's opening does nothing revealing or surprising in the vein...if you'll permit... of character development. It does, however, hint of perverse TWISTs for the sake of perversity that are coming, and thoroughly characterize a movie that is provocative for all the wrong reasons. The masturbatory/drug swoon sequence (of Catherine McCormack's "Greta")summarizes everything WRONG, irrelevant, and annoying about a film pretending to be about one thing and reveling in another. "LIFE is not a cabaret!" old chums. And A SHADOW is neither about Vampires or an allegedly great eccentric director. It is about "nosferatu"...if you accept its translation as "the diseased". The film has good parts. ((The "Interview with the Vampire" scene is funny and hip)) But the entire project is an "out-of-frame" celebration of decadence proposed as substitute for Life and Art. To me this is PM-BS. Remember how pathetic characters in the film...deluding themselves about what was going on...seemed embracing evil; and imagining they're in control of "entertainment" that proved to be such deadly folly.....
Rating: 
Summary: Boring. Doesn't create the mood it attempts to.
Review: I guess I was just expecting a lot more out of this movie than I actually got. The premise of it is a making-of documentary of the movie Nosferatu, but with an extra twist of what it would be like if the actor playing Nosferatu really was a vampire. I think we were supposed to feel the whole movie or concept was spooky and unsettling. I'd say up till the last 15 minutes of the movie it was pretty boring and I kept looking up to see how long it would be till it was over. Some parts seemed very drawn out while a lot of other things were skipped over all together. Overall the movie is pretty forgettable and I wouldn't feel like I was missing much if I didn't see the movie at all. I did catch one interesting filming blunder. At the very end of the movie there is a scene where Greta is lying in bed and notices the vampire doesn't cast a reflection in the mirror and gets scared and they must sedate her. About 5 minutes later there is a shot with the vampire resting his head on her chest. You can clearly see the reflection of the back of his head in the mirror! (and its a fairly long , its visible for at least 10-15 seconds). Well, that was about the most interesting thing of the movie and likely the only thing I'll remember about it a year from now.
Rating:
Summary: NOSFERATU GOES STANISLAVSKY
Review: This is an awesome film looking back on the German vampire classic from the modern perspective. Willem Dafoe, himself a student of the Stanislavsky school in acting pays tribute to both, the acting philosophy he follows in real life and the great vampire character of the movie classic. Simply put, Stanislavsky method of acting states that you have to experience life as a character you portray in order to bring realism into your acting, so if you gonna play a grunt in a war movie, it would help to don the uniform and go on a few military exercises and live in the barracks for a few days.
The film itself does a good job spoofing the theater, aviation, and other fashionable obssessions of the twenties. The bickering scenes of the playwright vs THE DIRECTOR vs actor are hillarious and on the money done by people who love stagecraft and can offer menaingful comments on the subject. The film's only shortcoming is that all the character acting gets a bit self-conscious and self-indulgent in a few scenes
Rating:
Summary: Double feature?
Review: With the excellent new edition of Nosferatu now on DVD, Shadow makes a great second feature for a home vid double bill. Watching the films and listening to their commentaries back to back increases the enjoyment of both films.
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