Dracula

 Year:  1974

Director:  Dan Curtis

Screenplay:  Richard Matheson, from the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker

Starring:  Jack Palance, Simon Ward, Nigel Davenport, Pamela Brown, Fiona Lewis, Penelope Horner

Running Time:  100 minutes

Genre:  Horror

1897:  Solicitor Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown) is in Transylvania to visit mysterious nobleman Count Dracula (Palance), who plans to buy property in England.  However, Harker finds out too late, what his host's true motivations are.  In England, Arthur Holmwood (Ward) discovers that his fiancé Lucy (Lewis) is Dracula's latest victim, and it is up to him and Professor Van Helsing (Davenport) to stop the vampire for good.

The good count himself may not have proved to be immortal, but Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel has proved to be well nigh un-killable, with numerous adaptations in almost all forms of media.  Every Dracula fan has their favourite, and while this made-for-TV movie may not be one of the best, it is still a solid adaptation.  Producer and director Dan Curtis was familiar with horror having created the frankly bizarre supernatural daily soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-1971), as well as the TV movie The Night Stalker (1972) which was also scripted by Richard Matheson, and other adaptations of horror classics such as The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1968) which also starred Jack Palance.  As scripted by horror writer Richard Matheson, this adaptation of Dracula remains faithful to Stoker's novel, albeit streamlining it a lot and cutting many supporting characters, including Dracula's bug-eating servant  Renfield.  Jack Palance, who was best known for playing heavies in gangster films and Westerns, may seem a strange choice for Dracula, but he does well, giving Dracula a Byronic menace, as well as a physicality often absent in other versions of the character.  The other performances are solid, and the film benefits from being filmed largely in England and Yugoslavia, despite being made for American TV.  While the film has its slow points, and there are times when the fairly low budget is obvious, it is a pretty impressive piece of work, and well worth checking out for horror fans.  The film's on-screen title is Bram Stoker's Dracula but, when Francis Ford Coppola was preparing his own film, also titled Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), he bought the rights to the title in order to avoid comparisons, and the 1974 film is listed as either Dracula or Dan Curtis' Dracula.  There are a couple of other points of similarity between this and the 1992 film, in both Dracula is explicitly referred to as the historical Vlad Dracula (aka Vlad the Impaler) and in both versions Dracula hunts down the reincarnation of his lost love (Lucy in this film and Mina in the 1992 film).     

Jack Palance is Dracula

Batman

Year of Release:  1989
Director:  Tim Burton
Screenplay:  Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren, from a story by on Sam Hamm, based on characters created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger
Starring:  Micheal Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Billy Dee Williams, Micheal Gough, Pat Hingle, Jack Palance
Running Time:  121 minutes
Genre:  Action, science-fiction, fantasy, superhero

In Gotham City, reporter Alexander Knox (Wuhl) is investigating the mysterious "Batman" terrorizing the city's criminals.  No-one takes Knox seriously except photojournalist Vicki Vale (Basinger).  The trail leads them to eccentric billionaire Bruce Wayne (Keaton).  Meanwhile, the city's police department are desperate to bring down powerful crime boss Carl Grissom (Palance) and his ruthless enforcer Jack Napier (Nicholson).  Realising that Napier is having an affair with his girlfriend, Alicia (Jerry Hall), Grissom sets him up during a raid on a chemical works.  Batman intervenes and badly injures Napier, who is presumed dead.  Shortly afterwards Gotham City's underworld is taken over by a mysterious and deadly new criminal known as The Joker, who plans a horrific revenge on the good people of Gotham City.

This is kind of a difficult film because it gets a lot right, and when it's good it's brilliant, but it gets a lot wrong, and when it's bad it is terrible.  At the time it came out Batman was probably best known to general audiences from the campy 1960s TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward, but in the world of comics writers such as Frank Millar, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were bringing a much darker and grittier version of the Dark Knight with critically acclaimed stories such as The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Year One (1987), The Killing Joke (1988) and Arkham Asylum (1989).  The film combines both aesthetics, despite the gloom and surprising levels of violence, a lot of it is as camp as anything in the TV series.  As you would expect from Tim Burton, the film has a lot of visual style.  Borrowing a lot from the shadowy world of traditional film noir, Gotham City is an almost surreal blend of 1920s, 1940s and 1980s styles.  Micheal Keaton does a great job as Bruce Wayne and Batman, although his casting was controversial at the time, with some fans deeming him not muscular enough for the role, as well as the fact that he was best known as a comedy actor.  He makes Bruce Wayne a strange and slightly sinister character (although to be fair, it is a little strange to dress up in an animal costume and beat up criminals every night), however it is slightly odd the amount of times that Batman get his ass kicked in the film.  He's knocked over a couple of times and gets knocked out and unmasked once by a gaggle of random goons (which include Mac McDonald, best known as Captain Hollister in Red Dwarf (1988-present)).  However Jack Nicholson is perfect as The Joker.  However, the film's biggest flaw is that it totally demystifies The Joker, because it gives him a definitive origin, whereas the character works better when he is ambiguous, as well as forcing a connection between the Joker and Batman.  Kim Basinger is good as Vicki Vale, although she is not given enough to do.  The film's unsung hero, however is Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox.  It's an interesting idea to have a superhero story told from the point of view of an investigative journalist and Knox adds a lot of humour to the story, and he is the main character early in the film, but then he pretty much gets written out and abandoned. 
The film was released to huge publicity in the summer of 1989, and, when viewed with later Batman films, seems like kind of an oddity.  Tim Burton openly stated that he had no interest in comics, and the filmmakers don't really seem to connect with the Batman mythology and it's characters.  

Batman (Micheal Keaton) investigates The Joker (Jack Nicholson) in Batman