Our Winona is stunning in a dual role as Elisabeta (love of Count Dracula) and Mina Harker (Elisabeta's look-alike born four hundred years later). This version followed Stoker's book pretty closely, so viewers should not be surprised to see the Count walking about in broad daylight. (The myth that sunlight kills vampires was started with the 1922 film Nosferatu). Some of the nudity was a bit gratuitous, but overall a good, sexy, horror film, truly spanning oceans (the Altantic and the Mediterranean Sea) and time (four centuries).
As the map above suggests, this film was both nautical and naughty, though mostly the latter. Over her career, the sexual tension in Noni's work has ebbed and flowed, never coming closer to the long-established boundaries of her on-screen modesty than in this film. This is Noni at her most voluptuous and libidinous, and though she tears at her clothes in several scenes and in two characters, she manages to remain the only woman to keep all of her clothes on through the entire film. Well played.
The Hayes-Bohs concur -- Final verdict: four croquet balls.
