Mina is finally home and has received an invitation to Grayson’s demonstration of the resonator.  Lucy is avoiding the sun, telling her mother she isn’t feeling well and insisting on not seeing any doctors.

Mina goes to see Harker to give him back his mother’s cross necklace, but Harker does not want it back.  Harker tells Mina how Grayson ruined his life and career, and that he has done some vile things.  Mina cannot swear that she doesn’t love Grayson.

The best seer available arrives in town to help search out Dracula and all of his nests of vampires.  He brings a major Christian relic, the blood of Christ.  This will help him snuff out the locations of all of the vampires in town.  The seer finds a nest right away, and hunters are dispatched and kill two vampires.

After two days in hiding, Harker finally returns to work, confessing to Grayson that he murdered Lord Davenport.  Grayson doesn’t let on that he already knew, and urges Harker to carry on as usual as best he can.  Harker walks away smirking, letting us know that a plan has been set off.

This week on Dracula we begin with a flashback that shows Grayson chained to a pole and fighting several members of the Order. Apparently he did something to disobey them. They slit his throat, and he is surprised to wake up chained in a dungeon. They turned him into a vampire.

Grayson receives notification that the transfer of Lord Laurent’s stock to him has been finalized, and Grayson is now the majority stockholder of British Imperial Coolant. Harker and Renfield go to an office and use their newfound power to get special treatment and resources for their projects. Renfield gives Harker a list of names of people that Grayson wants him to become friendly with.

Lady Jayne visits a doctor at a mental hospital to get some drugs to help her seers. This doctor needs to get the serum from Van Helsing, who insists on knowing who it is. Grayson tells Van Helsing to give her what she wants, or else they’ll get it from someone else that they have no control over.

Lord Davenport (or it may have been the higher up that’s always talking with Lady Jayne, it’s hard to keep track of everyone) meets with Lord Laurent. He asks Laurent if there is anything he should know about the sale of the stock, or else he will face swift punishment. Laurent refuses to say anything, and will be brought before the Order.

A flashback is shown in 1881 Romania of Van Helsing waking up Dracula. He has to convince Dracula to work with him to eliminate the Order of the Dragon. They killed both of their families, and he has the means to fight them. This is basically a five-minute version of the one line they told us last week. So we already knew this, but got a recap video anyway.

Van Helsing is drawing some blood from Grayson. Grayson tells him that the Order knows there is a vampire in town, all because Grayson killed Clive, and the huntsman. Van Helsing is working on a drug for Grayson that will allow him to go out during the day.

Lucy offers her colors to a man in a fencing competition. He promptly loses to Lord Davenport’s son. I get the feeling that Lucy is trying to break up Harker and Mina, but I can’t figure out exactly why. She has an evil feeling about her. And she keeps doing things to remind us that he’s poor.

Lady Wetherby wants to hunt the vampire herself. Even though she says this, she tries to hire to coked out looking people to find him. They have some sort of visionary powers, but Grayson can sense they are watching him, and thwarts them.

If you think the picture above is rather tame and boring, that pretty much describes a huge portion of the first episode of this series. What I was expecting to be a violent horror-based show, turned out to be a surprisingly uneventful mash-up of alliances and company business.

The show begins with two men breaking into a vault and opening up a coffin. There is a skeleton inside, and one of the men begins looting the valuables. The other man stabs him and slits his throat, directing the blood into the skeleton’s mouth. Dracula is re-born!

It is 1896 in London, and for some reason Dracula has to pretend to be an American businessman named Alexander Grayson. Grayson throws a party with a bunch of wealthy townspeople. They all want to meet him, but it’s never really explained as to why. Some of the men hold patents that Grayson wants to buy for his company, but one of the men says they do not deal with Americans.

Happy belated 4th of July to all you War Movie Mondays fans. In celebration of our nation’s 235th anniversary, this week’s pick salutes American submariners of World War II with U-571 (2000) directed by Jonathan Mostow.

The film stars Matthew McConaughey (Lt. Andrew Tyler) Bill Paxton (Capt. Mike Dahlgren), Harvey Keitel (Chief Gunner’s Mate Henry Klough), Jon Bon Jovi (Lt. Peter Emmet), and David Keith (Maj. Matthew Coonan).

U-571 is a fictional account about a U.S. Navy submarine crew which boards, and captures a German U-boat in the Spring of 1942 in order to seize the German’s secret cipher machine code named: Enigma. The device allowed the German high command to transmit radio messages to their U-boat fleet which were destroying the vital convoy lines from America to Britain. The code was unique and made it impossible for the allies to determine the German’s plans in the early stages of the war.

The film is superbly acted and won an Academy Award for Best Sound, but the film was not very well received in both England and Germany. The film was bashed in Britain due to the fact that the British were the first to ever capture an Enigma coding device in the war courtesy of the HMS Bulldog and HMS Aubretia of the 3rd Escort Group in the North Atlantic on May 9th 1941, seven months before the U.S. entered the war. Critics in Germany were none to thrilled of the way U-boat crewmen were portrayed.

The Big Bang looks like a bug nutty movie, totally the kind of crazy that is either inspired or down right horrible. I appreciate that the film takes stylistic risks to stand out, and the cast assembled is pretty stacked, so I am willing to give it a shot.

In anticipation of the May 13th limited release, Anchor Bay has released 2 new clips from the film. In the first clip we get to see a pair of the stellar character actors that populate the film playing the cops firing on our hero. The awesome Thomas Kretschmann and the awesomer Delroy Lindo unload a barrage of bullets into Banderas’ car. He, of course, responds in kind.

In the second clip we see a far more important piece of the story. Banderas is at his private eye desk, doing his private eye things when a mysterious giant appears. This is likely an important moment from earlier in the film, setting up the main action for the rest of the movie.

These clips are pretty standard for the private eye genre, but the trailer has promised something far more interesting and generally nuts. Hopefully these new tidbits will fit into the context of the film in a satisfyingly crazy way. Check out both clips after the jump.

Diane here and fresh off  the red carpet premiere of Universal Studios’ Hollywood latest attraction, King Kong 360 3D.  If you have a chance to swing on by this summer, it is worth the wait.

Yesterday while walking among a 360lb Bengal Tiger, a 13 foot Python, a feisty monkey, and tribal dancers who kept on telling me to touch their dinosaur bones I became entranced with the world of Skull Island and a gorilla who’s eaten one too many Big Macs.

I was not alone, The Office’s Craig Robinson, Oscar Nunez, and Kate Flannery, along with Kevin Smith, Yvette Nicole Brown of Community, Wayne Brady,Wanted and King Kong’s Thomas Kretschmann, and a very shy Christopher Lloyd were all there sampling the gourmet apps and reveling in a filmed introduction to the experience by none other than a slimmed down Peter Jackson in 3D.