'Dracula Untold' review: Fangs for nothing

Universal's "Dracula Untold" brings the old undead nobleman back to life, this time re-envisioning him as a kind of dark superhero, complete with origin story and eternal nemesis.

Well, who asked them?

True, having sucked as much life from their classic monsters as possible, the studio would obviously like to revive the lot, spinning out the requisite new trilogies. ("Dracula Untold" ends, of course, unconcluded.)

But Dracula is not the original Batman.

He is his own monster, made up of scraps of Romanian history and Bram Stoker's very Victorian fears of female lust, venereal disease and oily foreign seducers.

He is the great, gentlemanly ghoul the fiend in dinner clothes who must ask permission before crossing your threshold and as such he stands alone among the mass of stumbling creatures, and apart from the requirements of modern movie marketing.

But "Dracula Untold" drops that idea, this time combining the same old shreds of 15th-century history with modern fears of rampaging Muslim hordes. It updates the xenophobia while lessening the magic (and taming the eroticism for a mass-audience PG-13).

Luke Evans is Dracula, a Transylvanian royal who having survived a brutal captivity among the Turks now stands as his country's, indeed Europe's, last bulwark against their aggression.

But he know he cannot hold them off forever. No single human can. No single human... but perhaps something else could? And so Dracula makes a dark bargain with an ancient creature, and begins his war.

This is a new slant on the tale, admitted, but it's not a particularly satisfying one, nor is it handled in a very dramatic way.

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'Dracula Untold' review: Fangs for nothing

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero