April 21, 2009

Nosferatu

Title: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
Year: 1922
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writer: Henrik Galeen, based on a novel by Bram Stoker
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder
Music: Dvorak (on a crappy video release)
Distinctions: currently #234 on IMDb's Top 250
Synopsis: a vampire Count moves to the city
Length: 81 minutes
How I saw it: on video (rented from Netflix), October 2008
Subjective Rating: 3/10 (Bad).
Objective Rating: 3/10 (gets points for concept, cinematography and special effects/design) c. 1.9/4 (Eh).

Schreck's vampire is very cool and creepy. But he's only on screen for five or ten minutes, and everything else in the movie is terrible. If you do see it, I suggest not getting it from Netflix. I understand there are a lot of different versions out there, and the version we got from them had bad dialog cards (which were certainly not original), and for music they just put on Dvorak's New World symphony, which would have been terribly inappropriate and silly even if they'd bothered cutting it to match the cues, which they didn't. If you do get that version, watch it with the sound off and ignore the dialog, and the poor movie might have a chance.

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