With dizzying cinematic tricks and astonishing performances, Francis Coppola's 1992 version of the oft-filmed Dracula story is one of the most exuberant, extravagant films of the 1990s. Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, as the Count and Mina Murray, are quite a pair of star-crossed lovers. She's betrothed to another man; he can't kick the habit of feeding off the living. Anthony Hopkins plays Van Helsing, the vampire slayer, with tongue firmly in cheek. Tom Waits is great fun as Renfield, the hapless slave of Dracula who craves the blood of insects and cats. Sadie Frost is a sexy Lucy Westenra. And poor Keanu Reeves, as Jonathan Harker, has the misfortune to be seduced by Dracula's three half-naked wives. There's a little bit of everything in this version of Dracula: gore, high-speed horseback chases, passion and longing.

In its fourth season, Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to change its formula radically. Two major characters-the vampire-with-a-soul Angel and Cordelia, the queen bitch of Sunnydale High-had gone off to be in their own show, Angel, and soon after the start of the season Willow's werewolf boyfriend Oz left when Seth Green needed to concentrate on his film career. Buffy and Willow started college, where they met new characters like Riley, the All-American Boy with a double life, and Tara, the sweet stuttering witch; but Xander and Giles found themselves at something of a loose end. Several characters were subjected to the radical re-envisioning possible in a show that deals with the supernatural: the blond vampire Spike came back and soon found himself with an inhibitor chip in his head, forced into reluctant alliance with Buffy; the former vengeance demon Anya became passionately smitten with Xander. Not all fans were happy with the central story arc about the sinister Dr Walsh (Lindsay Crouse) and her Frankensteinian creation Adam, though Crouse's performance was memorable. The strength of Season Four was perhaps most in impressive stand-alone episodes like the silent "Hush", the multiple dream sequence "Restless" and the passionate, moving "New Moon Rising", in which Oz returns, apparently cured, only to find that Willow is no longer waiting for him. This was one of the high points of the show as a vehicle for intense acting, perhaps only equalled by "Who Are You?", in which the evil slayer Faith takes over Buffy's body and Sarah Michelle Gellar gets to play bad girl for once. -Roz KaveneyOn the DVD: Buffy Season 4 was a hit and so is this sublime box set. The commentaries for "The Initiative", "This Year'sGirl", "Superstar" and "Primaveral" are all well above average, but are nothing compared to "Hush" and "Restless" where Joss Whedon gives out all the information and insights any fan would dream of. The four featurettes included are a pleasure to watch, especially the evolution of the sets for the show. [+]

Eurotrash sex/horror auteur Jesus Franco's Female Vampire delivers nudity, drinking of human body fluids, plentiful zoom shots, languorous music, a vestigial storyline and the odd moment of surrealism (a flapping bat car ornament). It opens with a soulful-eyed brunette (Lina Romay) striding through misty woods wearing only thigh-boots, a leather belt and a black cloak, then chancing across a breeder of tropical birds upon whom she performs an act of oral sex that winds up painfully and fatally for the poor chump. One of Franco's better films, this still has an extremely leisurely pace which means that the story drifts dreamlike (or tediously, depending on your point of view) between protracted but unappealing sexual encounters as a smitten fellow with the requisite 70s porno moustache (Jack Taylor), a vampire-hating doctor (director Franco) and a blind coroner pursue the gloomy Countess for their own reasons. The vampire is mute but has an Anne Rice-style whining voice-over, and the dubbing means that everyone else seems equally dissociated from the words that fail to approximate their lip movements. Fans of Lina's frustrated naked writhings get to see her do the thing on top of several men and women, a bed, a tree and in a bath of blood. To Franco-philes, it's a masterpiece; to everyone else, wearisome tat. On the DVD: Female Vampire on disc comes with a nice widescreen transfer of a print that goes on longer than any previous UK release (though it runs 94 mins, not the 101 listed on the cover); an alternate opening sequence (with the title The Bare Breasted Countess); a fairly complete list of Franco credits; a French trailer (for La Comtesse aux Seins Nus); and four brief alternate scenes from a version of the film with less explicit sex but more blood (i. e. , necks are bitten but not private parts). -Kim Newman.

"Once More With Feeling", a much needed shaft of lightness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's dark sixth series, demonstrates that a "special" episode can be genuinely special. It preserves the show's continuity for its regular watchers and also delights people who have never experienced it before. This is creator Joss Whedon's tribute to all the masters of the stage musical whom he admires-most obviously Stephen Sondheim-and a chance for his talented cast to display their usual tight ensemble and sing and dance while doing it. The premise is typical Buffy both in its whimsy and its emotional truth-a demon forces the inhabitants of Sunnydale to express their emotions truthfully and uncovers a variety of embarrassing secrets. The actual musical ability of the Buffy cast is variable-Amber Benson as Tara and Anthony Stewart Head as Giles are perhaps the only ones with enough musical talent to carry purely lyrical tunes, but Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy is a game little trooper who delivers her various patter songs with her usual efficiency and charm. Emma Caulfield as the ex-demon Anya is the big surprise, her short paranoid riff on the subject of that ultimate evil, bunny rabbits is quite extraordinary; Broadway hoofer Hinton Battle is fabulous as Sweet: "I can bring whole cities to ruin and find time to get some soft shoe in. " -Roz Kaveney.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula-the final film in which Christopher Lee played Dracula-is a bleak, even poignant affair. The vampire and his adversary Lorimer Van Helsing reach the end of the line amidst the desolate, rain-streaked concrete city scapes of the early 1970s. Dracula has, it seems, allowed his contempt for humanity to reach its logical conclusion: no longer content with drinking blood, he has gathered together a group of scientists and created a plague which will eradicate all life on earth. This quasi-medical plot admits a certain element of Avengers-style techno-kitsch-all the more uncanny, then, that Joanna Lumley here takes over Stephanie Beacham's role as Van Helsing's grand-daughter Jessica-yet it's all off-white enamel and Formica rather than lights and dials. There is an extraordinary scene in which Dracula, masquerading as a property tycoon, is confronted by Van Helsing in his office. He is no longer the brooding, elemental figure of yore, but instead lurks in the shadows behind his desk, having become little more than a shifty businessman, while Van Helsing seems to realise that the two of them are nothing more than tired old men fighting a battle which has become meaningless. Fascinatingly odd. The video comes with some nice behind-the-scenes fact cards. -Roger Thomas.

Vampire-slayer Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a Californian community located above the "Hellmouth", a phenomenon which explains the local graveyard's overpopulation of vampires and other supernatural beings. Angel, a mysterious loiterer, starts flirting with Buffy and gives her helpful tips on how to cope with the local nasties. However, he turns out to be a vampire, which complicates the future of their relationship. Buffy makes friends with school outcasts Willow, a computer nerd, and geeky Xander. But she excites the enmity of high-school princess Cordelia. The season's prime villain is the Master, a Nosferatu-looking vampire lurking under the town. Giles, Buffy's mentor, looks things up in books and demonstrates the exact same look of puzzlement actor Anthony Head used to demonstrate in those horrifying instant coffee ads. -Kim Newman.

The first few minutes of John Carpenter's Vampires-in which James Woods' vampire killer leads a dawn raid on a New Mexico "goon nest" of bloodsuckers-not only suggests a horror movie that refuses to pull its punches, but even evokes some of the more disturbing dream-memories of American Westerns. Muscular and uncompromising, the sequence suggests a new Carpenter classic unravelling before one's eyes. Things don't quite work out that way, but this is still a film to reckon with. There are a few serious (and surprising) misjudgements on the director's part, particularly a mishandling of Sheryl Lee's role as a prostitute poisoned by the bite of a "master vampire" (who pretty much wiped out Woods' team of goon terminators). But aside from some weaknesses, the action is jolting, the suggested complicity of the Catholic Church in destroying monsters is provocative, and the traces of Howard Hawks' continuing influence on Carpenter's storytelling are in evidence. - Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Shadow of the Vampire is a film full of good ideas that are only partially developed. Clever, engaging, and boosted by the sublime casting of Willem Dafoe as Nosferatu "actor" Max Schreck, its premise is ripe with possibilities but the movie's too slight to register much impact: characters remain achingly underdeveloped and the whole lacks a sense of pace or structure. What's left, however, is enough for anyone to get their teeth into: the delightful performances from a sterling cast and director E Elias Merhige's affectionately tongue-in-cheek homage to a landmark of German silent cinema. John Malkovich is aptly loony as the eccentric director FW Murnau, whose passion in filming the 1922 classic Nosferatu leads to the extreme casting of Schreck as the vampire, a vision of evil who, in this movie's delightfully twisted imagination, actually is a vampire, sucking the blood of cast and crew members who've dismissed Schreck as an over-zealous method actor. As these on-set maladies and "accidents" continue, Schreck wields greater control over Murnau, who descends into a kind of obsessive art-for-art's-sake madness until diva co-star Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack, doing wonderful work) is served up as the actor's ultimate motivation. Merhige and his actors (including Cary Elwes, as intrepid cameraman Fritz Wagner) have great fun with this ghastly escapade, and the humour is kept delicately subtle to balance the movie's artistic aspirations. To that end, Dafoe is just right, his bald pate and gaunt features a perfect match for the mysterious Schreck, his grimace and talon-like fingers suggesting a human vulture on the prowl. Likewise, the re-creation of Nosferatu's expressionist style is both fanciful and brilliantly authentic. Too bad, then, that this movie suffers from a case of vampiric anaemia, with budgetary shortcomings apparently the cause of at least some of its shortcomings; if Shadow of the Vampire shared the depth and richness of, say, Ed Wood, it might have been a cult classic for the ages. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. [+]