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Post by almuric on Sept 28, 2021 11:25:38 GMT -5
It's almost that time of year again . . . I realized I hadn't covered any Jeckyll or Hyde movies before, so this year I'm making up for it with three. Stay tuned. Only three?  Come to think of it I only have one of them on DVD...and it's the one costarring a couple of guys from New Jersey. That is on the list, as well as a horror-adjacent movie of theirs I've never seen before. |
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Post by almuric on Oct 2, 2021 19:17:48 GMT -5
The Golem (1920) - This is now the oldest movie I've ever watched. Star/co-director/co-writer/ Paul Wegner is the titular being, a clay statue brought to life by Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinruck) in Medieval Prague to protect the city's Jews from their persecutors, but a series of disasters conspire to cause tragedy in spite of his good intentions. It's fascinating to watch a movie made in the days when the cinematic playbook was still being written. This is like a sneak peek of the next 20 years of Horror cinema. We've got the fantastical laboratory (destroyed in a climactic fire), an elaborate creation-of-the-monster sequence, an assistant tormenting the monster, the monster carrying off the female lead. Co-director/cinematographer Karl Freund would go on to work on Universal's early Horror cycle and Bela Lugosi's long-lost makeup test for the original Frankenstein was supposed to have been based Wegner's Golem makeup.
Your best bet is the recent Kino Lorber Blu-Ray featuring a commentary by film historian Tim Lucas.
Next time: No flesh shall be spared
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 2, 2021 19:52:06 GMT -5
I’ve got this one in a German three pack with Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. I think that one had no music track included.
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 5, 2021 8:17:52 GMT -5
Only three? Come to think of it I only have one of them on DVD...and it's the one costarring a couple of guys from New Jersey. That is on the list, as well as a horror-adjacent movie of theirs I've never seen before. A&C do have a whole horror subset you can do starting with one of their earliest. There's also another J&H derivative from another guy from Jersey that's on Prime right now. |
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Post by almuric on Oct 5, 2021 19:40:10 GMT -5
Color Out of Space (2019) - When Ben Gardner (Nicholas Cage, going the Full Cage) and his family are exposed to a mysterious meteorite, they quickly find themselves losing touch with reality, sanity and humanity as they are subjected to incomprehensible forces from beyond. As I've said before, Lovecraft's not easy to do on film. This is one of the better attempts. Writer-director Richard Stanley makes his return to Horror cinema with a movie that manages to capture the essence of his work while updating and expanding it just enough for a modern audience. There's definitely echoes of earlier Lovecraftian cinema, especially John Carpenter's The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness, and there's a great blend of CGI and practical effects to show the terrifying transformations visited upon the characters and the local wildlife.
BTW, check out the documentary Lost Souls, about the disastrous, stranger-than-fiction making of the 1996 Island of Lost Souls remake that nearly sank Stanley's career. It's hilarious and harrowing tale and I'm glad that it finally has a happy ending.
Next time: X marks the plot
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 6, 2021 6:54:01 GMT -5
This is one of the few Lovecraft's where cinema took two whacks at it. It was done as Die Monster Die with Karloff back in the mid 60s and the same director Daniel Haller did the Dunwich Horror in 1970 with look at her, it's Sandra Dee and she's naked (or the body double), and Dean Stockwell's craziest hair until Dune.
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Post by almuric on Oct 8, 2021 10:22:58 GMT -5
Doctor X (1932) - Horror was big from Universal's earliest hits and Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (to be reviewed next) and Warners got on the bandwagon. Sort of. You see, they wanted that sweet Horror money, but were also reluctant to market it as Horror. Instead it was Comedy. Or maybe a Mystery. But really, what else do you call a movie about a mad scientist donning a gruesome disguise and murdering people during the full moon?
This film has one big problem: the "hero". Played by Lee Tracy, he's the worst kind of wisecracking journalist, invading people's privacy and annoying the hell out of them, and the viewer, with his witless gags. Alas, heroine Fay Wray has him at gunpoint during their first meeting and fails to take the shot, later succumbing to his alleged charms. Tragic. But the protagonist aside, this is a pretty good movie. Lionel Atwill is the titular doctor. His plan to expose one of his fellow scientists as the Moon Killer, is Rube Goldberg-esque in its elaborateness. Amazingly, the police agree to it. The Moon Killer bears a slight resemblance to Rondo Hatton and the explanation for him and his crimes is one of the entertainingly loopy highlights of the movie. The movie is at its best when it isn't trying to be something it's not.
Like the later Mystery of the Wax Museum, was shot in the old two-strip Technicolor process, rendering everything in unearthly shades of pink and green. Director Michael Curtiz also shot a black-and-white version simultaneously which apparently has some slight differences (I haven't seen it). And because it's pre-Code, there's salacious bits that wouldn't have made it to the screen just a few years later, like a magazine of "French art" stuffed inside a textbook, or the reporter ducking into a brothel to phone his paper.
It's an oddity, but worth a look.
Next time: What's Dr. Jekyll been hyding?
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 8, 2021 10:45:44 GMT -5
Here's my double review of Dr. X and Wax Museum, written when the DVD collection came out lo those many years ago:
Who knew that back before Casablanca, back before all those Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Michael Curtiz was MASTER OF TWO COLOR TECHNICOLOR! Warners got around to putting these old primitive color movies out in whatever form they still exist, along side other films in much better shape.
The one they put out a few years ago has two versions of one story, each using different “gimmicks” as it were. MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) has an early Lionel Atwill performance as a master wax sculptor whose partner lives by the rule “Nice wax museum you got here. Shame if something was to happen to it. Lucky we got insurance…” Well, Atwill doesn’t take kindly to this and tries to stop the place from being torched, but fails miserably and ends up stuck in the conflagration. Years later, he’s back and opening another museum. But his hands are burned up, how is he doing all that great work? And who’s this mysterious masked figure stealing corpses from morgues? And what will happen to Fay Wray, who just so happens to look like his old statue of Marie Antoinnette? The picture still works pretty well, and the primitive color actually enhances the creepiness. Twenty years later, Warners remade this using another theatrical gimmick, 3-D, as HOUSE OF WAX (1953). This is the one most of us saw while growing up since it was on TV all the time, compared to the original which was feared lost for many years. And it has a lot of popular touchstones-Vincent Price in one his most famous horror roles, all the goofy 3-D images, like a guy bouncing a paddle ball in your face (not to mention the can-can girls) and familiar faces Charles Bronson and Carolyn Jones in supporting roles. It follows the original pretty closely, redoing some scenes shot for shot. And it’s still kind of creepy, though I have to admit the original was more so.
But it turns out Mystery wasn’t the first time Curtiz had used the early Technicolor. A year earlier, he’d made DOCTOR X, with the same star (Atwill) and female co-star (Fay Wray). A killer stalks the streets and it looks like it might be a scientist. So the cops turn to a fellow scientist to come up a plan to trap the real killer. The story itself is more crime than horror…until the end when the doctor’s discovery (synthetic flesh) is used to find the killer. Not bad, but typical of its time. On the newly released disc, it is paired up with a sequel that’s not really a sequel. THE RETURN OF DR. X isn’t about the Dr. X from the first movie coming back. It’s about ANOTHER Dr. Xavier fooling around with stuff not to be fooled around with, namely bringing the dead back to life. The oddity with this one is the mad doctor is played by Humphrey Bogart, in one of those movies Jack Warner made him do as a contract player. The make-up was good, the plot very much a B-movie one, namely not of the highest caliber.
With the exception of House of Wax, these pictures are mainly for die-hard movie buffs and horror fans. But considering how rare the older movies were (I think I’d only seen Mystery on a PBS station once, and never saw the Dr. X movies on TV at all), it’s good to have them readily available.
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Post by almuric on Oct 10, 2021 19:17:58 GMT -5
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) - This is the classic, Oscar-winning retelling of the oft-told tale of the well-meaning but doomed doctor (Fredric Marsh) and his brutish alter ego that set the pattern for the versions to come. It seems like I bag on Browning's Dracula way too often, but it's hard to believe merely a year separates that movie from this one. They feel like products of different decades. Director Rouben Mamoulian utilizes POV shots, split screens, montages. The makeup on Marsh is superb (though in modern clarity it's obvious Hyde's nostrils have been "widened" by black paint) and it gradually becomes more simian with every transformation, as if Jekyll is regressing down the evolutionary line. Marsh does a great job of being the sympathetic Jekyll, giving the doctor a subtle undercurrent of repressed sexual frustration that comes boiling out as Hyde.
Praise must also be showered on Miriam Hopkins as the doomed bar singer Ivy. Because this was pre-Code, there's a sexiness to her performance that's startling even now. Her flirtation with Jekyll, her suffering at the hands of Hyde, and her fatal realization that they are the same man are heartbreaking. When it was rereleased a few years later, the movie suffered eight minutes of cuts and the film was nearly lost when MGM tried to buy up all copies of this version to destroy them so it would not overshadow theirs.
This is already not endearing me to the remake.
Next time: Invitation to a haunting
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 10, 2021 21:15:16 GMT -5
Hate to be that guy: Fredric March It's certainly far different than the somewhat stiff Dracula and even Whale's more interesting Frankenstein. The transformations scenes are stunning, consider how low-fi technology they used. And yeah, you'll be disappointed in the 1941 version. Its best influence was a joke in the Bugs Bunny short Hare Remover. |
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Post by almuric on Oct 12, 2021 9:50:16 GMT -5
The Uninvited (1944) - Music critic Ray Milland and his sister (Ruth Hussey) buy an abandoned house in Cornwall and soon are dealing with a ghost and trying to unravel a family tragedy. Alfred Hitchcock almost directed this, but instead Lewis Allen, making his feature-length film debut, got the honors. Allen intended the supernatural elements to be more ambiguous, but the studio decided that a ghost story should have ghosts and if you pay attention, you'll see most of the special effect scenes are inserts without the cast present. In spite of studio meddling, the film works nicely, with good performances, even if some of the "British accents" aren't. The crisp black and white cinematography by Charles Lang rightfully won an Oscar and the song "Stella by Starlight", created for this movie, became a jazz standard. There is apparently a hint of lesbianism in the film that I somehow missed completely. All in all, one of the best haunted house movies.
Next time: You look like Boris Karloff and you don't even care
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Post by almuric on Oct 13, 2021 19:53:01 GMT -5
Frankenstein 1970 (1958) - The success of the old Universals on TV prompted studios to cash in on their revived popularity. Boris Karloff, who was now elderly, was still willing to do these kind of roles, even though he decried them as "Cheap, tawdry and disgusting". And boy, after watching this movie, it's hard to disagree.
This movie starts well, with a monster chasing a girl in a dark forest . . . which is revealed to be a movie being shot by a film crew at Castle Frankenstein for the 230th anniversary of Frankenstein. I assume they mean the 230th anniversary of Victor's ancestor because if it was the novel this movie would be Frankenstein 2048. Despite it's then-futuristic setting, there's not much difference between 1970 and 1958, apart from Dr. Frankenstein getting his own personal atomic reactor installed in the castle. Dr. Frankenstein (Karloff, hamming it up) is one of the many Last of the Frankensteins who inhabit B-movies. The film's brief-yet-not-brief-enough running time is dedicated to way too many scenes of the film cast and crew being awful to each other and Frankenstein puttering around his laboratory while assembling his monster and occasionally killing off a character. Considering that the film has about a dozen people working on it, you'd think they'd get the "German" police involved a lot sooner. The Monster in this case looks more like a Mummy than a homunculus, with a head that's comically oversized. How does this eyeless Monster keep getting in and out of Frankenstein's hidden laboratory? Beats me. If only they had put as much effort into the real movie as the fake one.
Compare and contrast with how Hammer was modernizing the Frankenstein legend on screen, not with atomic reactors and slumming actors, but with color, blood and sex. This is available on Blu-Ray with a commentary by Tom Weaver, which is about the only reason to see this a second time.
Next time: The ghosts step out
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Post by almuric on Oct 15, 2021 15:58:42 GMT -5
The Time of Their Lives (1946) - A few years before they met Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello had another brush with the Horror genre. This movie came at an awkward time for the boys. They were barely on speaking terms at the time and the movie had work around the fact that the leads didn't want to be around one another. The result is one of the more unusual movies in their filmographies.
During the Revolutionary War, tinker Horatio Prim (Costello) is mistaken for a Loyalist traitor and executed along with Melody Allen (Marjorie Reynolds) and cursed to haunt the site of their deaths unless evidence of their innocence is found. Abbott plays Dr. Ralph Greenway, descendent of the man who sold Horatio up the river. He and Costello barely share the screen, and when they do, Abbott is unable to see Costello or interact with him. Amazingly, all this works to the film's advantage. There's a number of great scenes with the ghosts trying to understand the modern world, including a scene with a radio which loudly plays a show clearly based on The Shadow, and even some dramatic stakes. It ends on a surprisingly beautiful scene. Director Charles Barton would go on to make several more films with the duo, including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Next time: Hyde 2.0
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Post by johnnypt on Oct 16, 2021 13:19:42 GMT -5
The Time of Their Lives (1946) - A few years before they met Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello had another brush with the Horror genre. This movie came at an awkward time for the boys. They were barely on speaking terms at the time and the movie had work around the fact that the leads didn't want to be around one another. The result is one of the more unusual movies in their filmographies.
During the Revolutionary War, tinker Horatio Prim (Costello) is mistaken for a Loyalist traitor and executed along with Melody Allen (Marjorie Reynolds) and cursed to haunt the site of their deaths unless evidence of their innocence is found. Abbott plays Dr. Ralph Greenway, descendent of the man who sold Horatio up the river. He and Costello barely share the screen, and when they do, Abbott is unable to see Costello or interact with him. Amazingly, all this works to the film's advantage. There's a number of great scenes with the ghosts trying to understand the modern world, including a scene with a radio which loudly plays a show clearly based on The Shadow, and even some dramatic stakes. It ends on a surprisingly beautiful scene. Director Charles Barton would go on to make several more films with the duo, including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Next time: Hyde 2.0
This one actually contains a real life rarity: Bud Abbott driving. He had epilepsy so he never got a license. They had him do a few driving scenes for this picture, he hated it and never drove again. Gale Sondergaard does a very impressive Mrs. Danvers impersonation, so much so Binnie Barnes' character actually comments on it. This film ranks very high among A&C aficionados, up with Meets Frankenstein and Buck Privates. This and Little Giant are essentially Costello solo films with Abbott in supporting roles. It also wasn't the first time the team dealt with "ghosts". Hold That Ghost from 1941 was supposed to be their second starring film, but when Buck Privates hit big, they pushed it back for In the Navy. It's a typical "haunted house that really isn't" film from the era (the hidden from syndication but available on imdbTV Blondie Has Servant Trouble from the same year has a very similar plot). The film also contains early appearances from two performers who went onto to bigger fame in the 50s. Richard Carlson was a Universal contract player at the point but went onto star in genre classics It Came From Outer Space, The Maze and of course Creature from the Black Lagoon. Joan Davis was Costello's love interest and they play really well off each other. She became the title character in I Married Joan with Jim Backus. Davis unfortunately was unavailable for studio ordered reshoots for the end of the film, which added a sequence with the Andrew Sisters to play on their appearances in the earlier two films, which is why she gets the blow off there. Going back to TTOTL, Marjorie Reynolds also found success in the 50s as William Bendix's wife in Life of Riley. |
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Post by almuric on Oct 18, 2021 19:23:19 GMT -5
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) - MGM's remake of the 1931 movie is a lavish, beautifully-shot, well-mounted bore. Spencer Tracy's makeup is so minimal that I found it hard to believe people could possibly think Hyde is anybody but a lightly-disguised Jekyll. The profile of Tracy's face is unmistakable. Jekyll and Hyde look similar enough to be brothers. Worse, while Tracy is okay as Jekyll he's hopelessly lost at sea as Hyde. Instead of a distillation of man's evil, he comes off as a hammy bully. This movie is almost half an hour longer than the original and it feels more like an hour. Scenes that crackled with tension in the original drag out forever here. Ingrid Bergman's Cockney-by-way-of-Swedish accent is distracting. Something good did come of this movie: Bob Kane and Bill Finger were inspired to create the Batman villain Two-Face from the poster artwork showing Tracy's divided visage. There's also a few shots in the movie that may have provided them with some ideas.
The worst part: the Fredric March version was nearly lost forever when MGM bought up all the copies they could and destroyed them. Can you imagine if modern Hollywood did that when they remade something?
Truly terrifying.
Next time: 'Til man exists no more
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