A one-joke movie -- a seeming fun idea -- played torpidly and ponderously. The idea is that Max Schreck, the cadaverous vampire of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, was a bona fide vampire in real life and that his previous employment experience with Max Reinhardt's Berlin Staatstheater was only a cover story. What kills some or most of the fun is that (a) a lot of the movie, including even the vampire's introductory appearance on screen, is lost in darkness; (b) the idea assumes and encourages the moviegoer's ignorance of film history; (c) it strips Murnau, never mind Schreck, of his originality and demotes him to a mere documentarist; and (d) he is played by John Malkovich. (Or as Udo Kier, a commendable vampire in Andy Warhol's Dracula, is obliged at one point to put it: "It's not so funny anymore.") Nevertheless: the re-creations of scenes from the 1922 horror classic are uncannily accurate, and the period detail of the silent director talking his actors through a take is highly credible, and the much-lauded performance of Willem Dafoe as the bloodsucker is lusty as well as lascivious, given the caveat that he is following a path cleared by both Schreck and, in Werner Herzog's slavish remake, Klaus Kinski. It should be he whose originality is in question. Written by Steven Katz; directed by E. Elias Merhige. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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