Bram Stoker's Dracula.

WHY THE perennial fascination of horror movies? If we are to believe Gore Vidal (in Screening History) it is that "any confirmation that life continues after death has an appeal to almost everyone except enlightened Buddhists. No one wants to be extinct." But extinction may be preferable to afterlife as a vampire in a Francis Ford Coppola movie. The latest, Bran, Stoker's Dracula, tries to be for Dracula what Apocalypse Now was for Vietnam, and the Godfather trilogy for the Mafia: gigantism as an end in itself, lusher as a synonym for better.

Perhaps I am being hopelessly old-fashioned but I don't trust people who can't toll the difference between lie and lay as far as I can throw up. In this movie, we keep hearing "lay down" and "lay back," and in the screenplay by James V. Hart (scenarist also of the hopeless Hook) we read: 'Panels pull apart to reveal Dracula laying in his 'day coma.'" Would you, mutatis mutandis, commission a score from a tone-deaf composer?

If you lust for luxury, to be sure, Bram Stoker's Dracula, i.e., Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, may be your Dracula, too. But if you want a film that knows what it wants and goes about its business efficiently, don't touch this one with a ten-foot stake. Coppola has engaged the services of a talented jet-set crew. The Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka has dreamed up her most nightmarish costumes, the German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus has come up with his customary spellbinding images, and the Polish composer Wojciech Kilar (best known for his work for Wajda) has concocted music that is no joke. Countless craftsmen, technicians, and special-effects wizards--and no fewer than three editors-have contributed their skills. The eye and the ear are dazzled, but the nose must be held.

The movie may be faithful in its fashion-show fashion to Bram Stoker's fustian novel, but faithfulness is a virtue only if its object is deserving. The film does not know what it is doing. It tries to make Dracula as sympathetic as he is horrible, for which the genius of a Shakespeare would be required. It makes Mina, the lovable heroine, love Dracula more than she does Jonathan, her fiance, which does not make our hearts go out to her. It tries to give us the historic background of Dracula, the Rumanian despot Vlad the Impaler, but in a kind of foreshortening that turns history into a comic strip. The protagonist is allowed so many different shapes that we perceive him more as a quick-change artist than as a vampire. And Coppola and Hart do not know how to invest the preposterous with the slightest aura of plausibility.

The film steals from all over. Its debt to Muruau's Nosferatu and Tay Garnett's Dracula is understandable, but must there also be cribbing from Cocteau's La Belle et la bete and Fellini's Casanova? I refer to the human arms as flambeaus, and to the twinpeaks sausage-roll hairdo for Dracula, which makes his head look impaled on the horns of a dilemma. But the worst theft may be replicating a dated novel about Victorian dread of sexuality instead of imaginatively rethinking it along modern lines-or, better yet, dropping it altogether.

Gary Oldman, a fine actor, strives to play a thinking man's Dracula, but between that effort and the straining to sound Transylvanian, he ends up giving a performance so carefully calibrated as to lose all semblance of trash-movie spontaneity. As Doctor Van Helsing, Anthony Hopkins has an even harder time with his Dutch accent, and ends up merely. peppering his lines with random jas. But what to do with a part that calls on him to answer Mina's anguished "You want to dissect her?" with a casual "Not really; I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart"? Winona Ryder, as Mina, manages a better British accent than one might have expected, and is very pretty except for her slightly batlike ears, which may explain her susceptibility to vampires. As Jonathan, Keanu Reeves looks befuddled, and delivers his lines in an electronically amplified whisper. Tom Waits, as Renfield, swallows various insects with real gusto, which may account for his patented growl as mere flies on the voice box.

A young English actress, Sadie Frost, plays the campy role of Lucy rather too cloyingly, but with a persuasively bared left breast. Three international models play the brides of Dracula even more bared--from fangs to (nearly) crotch  and would do any burlesque house proud. Coppola indulges himself in any number of such fancy touches. Thus he makes Dracula wear contact lenses of various colors to match the degree of luridness of the situation; allows "Dracula" to be pronounced in three separate ways; and cuts whimsically from a stake being driven into someone to someone eating steak, which makes the more sophisticated punsters in the audience squeal like a bunch of moon-mad paronomasiacs.