Pros: Very true to the book.
Cons: Jack Palance is ridiculous. Lucy is not that hot.
Also, in the DVD interview, Dan Curtis reveals something that is plain in his version, which I completely disagree with: he says the vampire is a monster, just like a person. That pisses me off. You might as well make one of the Anne Rice books, where the vampire is an immortal gay dude moping through eternity.
In the book Dracula, the entire point is the walking dead is an abomination. Call it going against God, or just the society, or whatever. Dracula’s character has a persona which is nearly impossible to analyse, and this is intentional- he is not a person who has cheated death. A vampire is a walking corpse with only fragments of remembered behavior clinging to it. It is a hideous construct you cannot reason with.
Look at Lucy’s behavior: she is creepy as hell. All her remembered behaviors are inverted. She is an inverted mother ideal, drinking the blood of young children. When she returns to seduce Arthur she uses all kinds of sweet talk, but it’s like if you took a tiger and replaced all its stalking behavior with flirting– it doesn’t like you, Arthur. It wants to eat you. It looks like Lucy, but it’s not.
Here’s another simile: reasoning with the vampire is like trying to talk to a brain damage victim, or someone with Alzheimer’s. All the wires are crossed; you can read meaning into what they are doing, but you are only fooling yourself. The genuine vampire is a walking corpse and has only the illusion of a personality.