NOSFERATU (2024) **

Folks, there’s a reason why the publicity department isn’t showing you what Nosferatu looks like in the new Nosferatu.  Remember the iconic look sported by both Max Schrek and Klaus Kinski?  Gone.  I don’t mean to tell tales out of school, but once we finally got a look at Nosferatu, I about fell out of my chair laughing.  Spoilers ahead. 

This new Nosferatu sports a fucking Rollie Fingers mustache.  Seriously.  Burt Reynolds has nothing on my boy Count Orlak.  Once I saw him, I just couldn’t take the rest of the movie seriously.  I tried.  Honestly, I tried.  It’s just I didn’t know if he was going to suck someone’s blood or offer them a hoppy IPA with nutmeg undertones. 

We’re talking Hipsteratu. 

I mean, this isn’t the first vampire with a mustache in cinema history.  Lon Chaney Jr. had a dapper one as Son of Dracula.  Gary Oldman’s flavor saver wasn’t bad either in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Bill Skarsgard in Nosferatu is one Yosemite Sam looking motherfucker. 

It’s disappointing because the movie looks like a million bucks (although it cost much more).  Some of the drab color schemes work, especially when it’s been completely drained out, so it looks like the black and white original.  I dug the sequence where our bland hero (Nicholas Hoult) goes to Orlak’s castle as the lack of transition shots added to the dreamlike quality of the scene.  Once I finally saw the Count, I was wide awake. 

Guys, I don’t know.  Maybe after It, The Crow, and this we should put a moratorium on remakes and reboots where Bill Skarsgard plays pasty-faced dudes. 

I will say this for Skarsgard, I wasn’t expecting him to hang dong in this.  We’re talking Schlongferatu.

And, you know, for a movie in which almost nothing happens, it’s awfully exhausting.  Lily-Rose Depp blusters and sobs and screeches, but we never feel any sexual tension between her husband OR the bloodsucking Count, which is the big problem.  I mean, Bela Lugosi I can see a gal getting worked up about.  Gary Oldman, sure.  Heck, even the original Nosferatu is a hottie compared to the new guy, who looks like a freeze-dried Frank Zappa. 

Sigh, I still can’t believe they made a movie where Nosferatu sports a Fu Manchu.

Even Willem Dafoe is disappointing as the vampire hunter.  He has a moment or two where it looks like he’s having fun, but he’s never really let off the chain to chew the scenery.  He does get the best line of the movie when he says, “It would make Sir Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!”