John Badham had made his name with the huge success of Saturday Night Fever (1977), a film more serious, mature and interesting than its disco-dancing milieu might suggest. It had marked the British-born but American-based Badham as a director to watch, following his feature debut The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) and for his next film, he chose to revisit one of the most oft-filmed of all books, breaking out all the Gothic trappings for a new version of Dracula. It was the biggest vampire film of a year that also saw Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre, Harry Hurwitz’ Nocturna and Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite all in cinemas and vying for the attention of vampire fans. Produced by Universal, Badham’s film owes as much to their 1931 adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and the 1924 play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston as it does to Bram Stoker’s novel.

The setting is updated to 1913, when the suave Count Dracula (Frank Langella) arrives from Transylvania aboard a ship that runs aground one stormy night. He’s found on the beach by Mina van Helsing (Jan Francis), who is visiting her friend Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan) (the names of the two women are, for some reason, swapped around in W.D. Richter’s screenplay), and later Dracula calls on Mina and her father, Dr Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence), to thank her. Though most of the people he meets are charmed by his old-school East European charm, he makes less of an impact on Lucy’s fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve). He wastes little time in drinking Mina’s blood and her father, Professor Abraham van Helsing (Laurence Olivier), is called to help. He suspects the worst – that Mina has been killed by a vampire and, in turn, he is eventually forced to kill her in a spookily shot encounter in some nearby mines. Dracula has, by now, set his sights on Lucy and she has become besotted with him, offering herself to him as his new bride. Seward and van Helsing manage to save her after she’s been bitten using a blood transfusion but Dracula’s influence over her remains strong and the race is on to find Dracula and kill him, before it’s too late.

Badham’s version of Dracula retains some of the stodginess of the Lugosi version but none of the energy of the Lee. It has some gorgeous photography, courtesy of Gilbert Taylor, and a terrific score from John Williams, but Richter’s script makes so many changes, particularly to Dracula himself, that little of the character actually remains. Langella is a fine actor but fails to impress as a romantic, matinee idol Dracula. Langella is one of the least frightening Draculas on film (he never reaches the depths of Oldman’s love sick version though) and as such, the film is fatally wounded even before it gets going. It’s hard to know exactly where to put the blame for this – presumably, it’s as Richter wrote the character though Langella has been quoted as saying that he didn’t want to make the character frightening and supposedly refused to wear fangs throughout (he’s the only vampire in the film without them). Langella played the part on Broadway before and after the Badham film, bagging a Tony nomination along the way, playing the Count in over 900 performances between 1977 and 1980. By all accounts, it was an impressive production, blessed with striking Edward Gorey sets and Langella is said to have been mesmerising in the part, though none of that comes across here sadly.

There are other problems too. Some of the supporting performances are below par (Olivier’s anguished howl of despair on despatching Mina is more laughable than moving and Pleasence is uncharacteristically off form) and there are some inexplicable moments of would-be surrealism involving lasers and dry ice and for all the money at Badham’s disposal, it’s occasionally rough around the edges. The continuity fluffs we might forgive, the very obvious stuntman who steps in for Olivier in the hold of the ship is so intrusive, it pulls you right out of the story. The lasers and solar flares that occasionally intrude on the action are a real head-scratcher – the solar flares perhaps one could charitably accept given Dracula’s aversion to sunlight, but the sub-James Bond title sequence nonsense during Dracula’s seduction of Lucy is just impossible to get one’s head around. What on Earth was Badham trying to do?

There is good to be found here. Though it does away with the Gorey sets from the stage play, it’s still a nicely appointed film, thanks to Gilbert’s lovely photography, some interesting locations (Dracula’s Carfax Abbey is located atop a hill to be found nowhere in the real Whitby where it’s supposed to be set, but it’s a striking use of the imposing St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall) and Peter Murton’s lavish production design. While Badham overdoes the Dracula-crawling-up-and-down-the-walls business, perhaps trying too hard to make up for its absence from so many earlier versions, he does stage two impressive set pieces. The first is the killing of Mina in the mines. Francis emerges from the darkness muttering “kom met me, papa” (“come to me, father”), a terrifying but also tragic figure beneath a highly impressive make-up job and it’s one of the few genuinely scary moments in the film. Then too there’s the over-the-top but unforgettable killing of Dracula, hauled on a rope through the deck of a ship where he flaps helplessly in the sunlight as he burns up, last seen turning into a kite of some sort and drifting off int the distance, perhaps ready for a sequel that never came.

But these are rare moments in a film that’s often just to enervating to keep up the interest across its over-long 109 minutes. It needed more energy, more unbridles sexuality and more of those moments like the undead Mina advancing on her father. It’s Not the worst of the many adaptations of the novel – that would be either the bloated Francis Ford Coppola version or Dario Argento’s bizarre take – but nor is anywhere near the best. Bizarrely, the best thing about it, it’s gorgeous appearance, was diluted by Badham when he chose to have the colour scheme dramatically desaturated for the 1991 laserdisc release, a version that remained the only one available for many years. Badham stated that he had planned to shoot the film in black and white but Universal had objected and the desaturated version was his attempt to try to make the film fit his original vision. Thankfully, the so-called “cinema version” was restored to more recent blu-rays and while the film never overcomes its shortcomings, it is at least restored to its original glory and that, in itself, is enough to revisit the film again from time to time. Perhaps…