It's this relentlessness of the action and technology that make the film more of a simulated ride. I wouldn't have boarded.

What's left is a world of industrial Gothicism, nightmare morphing effects, ahistoric gadgetry and Breughel-lite grotesquerie.

The exteriors are fantastic, the castles mega-looming, and there's a beautiful -- if fanciful -- masqued ball which shows off to perfection the costumes contrived by Gabriella Pescucci.

The text of Stoker and Shelley is treated as nothing more than toilet paper in the outhouse of writer-director Stephen Sommers’ imagination, soiled and shredded beyond all recognition.