Hart's screenplay covers not only what's in the original novel but also what Stoker saw fit to omit. Though set mostly in 1897 London and Transylvania, Mr. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much. 'Dracula' has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. Coppola's version looks like something that he might have imagined nearly 30 years ago, when he wrote and directed his first film, 'Dementia 13,' a tepid black-and-white horror movie made for about $12 and change. It's watchable today mostly as a footnote to the career of the man who also made 'Freaks' and 'The Devil Doll.' Tod Browning's 1931 'Dracula,' starring Bela Lugosi, is about nothing whatsoever. Murnau's unauthorized 1922 adaptation of the Stoker novel, is a silent-screen classic, but it is seen by many to be anti-Semitic. Interpretations can be fun, but they are also misleading. This 'Dracula' is most easily enjoyed if you don't search too hard for meanings, at least for those that go beyond the idea that the Stoker novel is really about Victorian England's fear of unleashed female sexuality. That's all very well and good, you might say, but shouldn't movies, even Dracula movies, be about something? With its gorgeous sets and costumes, its hallucinogenic special effects and mad montages that recall the original grandeur of Abel Gance's 'Napoleon,' this 'Dracula' transcends camp to become a testimonial to the glories of film making as an end in itself. Coppola has created his own wild dream of a movie, which looks as if it required a special pact with the Treasury Department to finance. Hart's unusually faithful screen adaptation of the novel, Mr. Yet Francis Ford Coppola's new extravaganza, suitably titled 'Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' ' to separate it from all others, is such a dizzy tour of movie-making forces that it comes close to overwhelming all reasonable doubts.

LITTLE did you suspect that the world has been dying for yet another film variation on 'Dracula,' Bram Stoker's classic of 19th-century gothic fiction.

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