The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 71

16 Friday December 12 2003 The Guardian Bb HH THE RULES OF DVD Out for the Count Peter Bradshaw on an intriguing avant-garde vampire film. Plus the rest of the week's movies FILM RELEASES Dracula Pages From a Virgin's Diary its full reign, too, and ballet is an excellent way of conveying Dracula's seduction ritual. The movie superficially resembles Dreyer and Murnau, and Maddin is perhaps trying to absorb the strangeness and exoticism of their movies and make their creative presence a kind of adjunct to Dracula's own. The difference is that films like Vampyr and Nosferatu have an uncompromising sincerity which makes them fascinating, and which the playful Maddin can't match. I saw a screening of Murnau's Nosferatu at the Berlin film festival this year with live piano accompaniment and the effect was authentically disturbing.

This wasn't. But it was diverting and stimulating nevertheless. Dead End Dir: Guy Maddin With: Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni, CindyMarie Small, Johnny A Wright, Stephane Leonard 73 mins, cert 12A zeitgeistfilms.comcurrentdracula dracula.html Sprightly Canadian maverick Guy Maddin has created an elaborate, self-conscious but arresting take on the Dracula myth. He directs the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in a version of the Bram Stoker novel, while photographing the entire thing like a hyper-real silent black-and-white movie, with orchestral score and fluorescent dialogue titles that occasionally appear on screen like the shout-lines from old Hollywood trailers. It's dredged up from the imaginary cinematheque of Maddin's own mind: bewhiskered faces loom in and out of focus and the film stock switches from grey to tinges of blue and pink, with hi-tech flashes of colour painted in.

The story concentrates largely on the part where the sinister count appears in Whitby, and a map of northern Europe shows his dark trajectory with the unsubtle legend: "Immigrants from the so pointing up the vampire as metaphor for xenophobia and paranoia. Dracula's sexual potency is given Dirs: Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Fabrice Canepa With: Ray Wise, Alexandra Holden, Lin Shaye, Mick Cain, Amber Smith, Billy Asher, Steve Valentine, Karen Gregan 85 mins, cert 15 Horror movies which start with the main characters bickering in a car nearly always promise more than they deliver. The bulk of the good dialogue is expended in the first five minutes, leaving us with a good hour and a half of semi-serious prurient slashing. But Dead End isn't too bad, maintaining some dark wit, atmosphere and clever deployment of its lower-than-low budget until almost the very end. Ray Wise plays Frank Harrington, a stressed dad driving his family to his in-laws' house on Christmas Eve for what jHH EQUILIBRIUM DVD I VIDEODVD RELEASES iiMi Tnw'TTiniTiTfninnii i i nir -V 1 MM Nd 1 JH90IMaiiHB The Sleeping Dictionary Rental and DVD rental EV Cert 15 natured, old-fashioned colonial love story.

Jenkin writes and directs as though it's 1955, before this sort of thing went out of fashion, along with the empire. Hugh Dancy is the morally upright young Englishman sent to 1936 Sarawak to learn the ropes from old-style governor Bob Hoskins. Local tradition allots him a girl to teach him the language and provide other services (hence the title). Lucky boy Dancy lands Jessica Alba best known as Dark Angel's stroppy superhuman biker and understandably finds the prospect of marriage with a Home A major surprise from Guy Jenkin, writer of enjoyably cynical TV fare like Drop the Dead Donkey and Jeffrey Archer: the Truth, this is a sweet- Ttii Rules Attraction 2003 Icon Home Entertainment. AU Rights Reserved.

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