Tag: Boris Karloff

Son of Frankenstein (1939) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , ,

As a kid this was one of my favorite Universal horror movies.  In a way it was the last of the legitimate Frankenstein movies from the series.  Boris Karloff played the Monster for the third and final time.  And they even brought back a couple of the actors from the original Frankenstein movie although as different characters. So, there was a certain amount of continuity with the first two movies.  Basil Rathbone adds his considerable talents to the production as the titular son of the original Dr. Frankenstein.  Lionel Atwill makes his turn as the memorable Inspector Krogh; he of the prosthetic right arm (which the Monster had torn off when Krogh was a child).  And even poor Bela Lugosi is there as Ygor to lend his legitimacy as a part of one of the earlier Universal films (Dracula) that had a lot of “prestige.”  Yes, this movie has everything.  Not only does the younger Dr Frankenstein have a very pretty wife but he also has a curly-haired young son whom the Monster befriends.  After this film the later Frankenstein films became kind of campy to my mind.  So, this is the climax of the original films.

I won’t worry about spoilers because we know that the Monster will come back for endless sequels so let’s just talk about the story.  Dr. Frankenstein and his family have arrived from the United States where he had met his wife.  They find the villagers surly and suspicious because mysterious deaths have continued to occur in the village and the Monster is still blamed for these.

We find out that Ygor has been hiding the Monster below the ruins of the destroyed laboratory but recently the Monster was struck by lightning (!) and hasn’t regained consciousness since.  Ygor wants the doctor to restore the creature.  Ygor was a grave robber who was hanged for his crimes but somehow the hanging didn’t kill him so he went free.  And now he’s befriended the Monster and it does his bidding.  Doctor Frankenstein is intrigued by his father’s creation and we are shown him using “modern” medical equipment like a fluoroscope to examine the Monster.  There’s some gibberish about his rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, cellular structure and we even find out that he has two bullets lodged in his heart which don’t seem to bother him at all.

So, the doctor sets up the generator and zaps the Monster but other than a short bout of consciousness he seems to have failed to rouse the Monster.  But later on, we hear that the doctor’s little boy met a “giant.”  And so, when the murders begin happening again both the doctor and Inspector Krogh are sure the Monster is on the loose again.  After a dart game between Doctor Frankenstein and the Inspector (which was thoroughly lampooned in Mel Brook’s movie; “Young Frankenstein) we have the climax of the movie.  Doctor Frankenstein kills Ygor in self-defense and the Monster kidnaps the little boy and brings him back to the lab.  At this point both the Inspector and the doctor attack the Monster.  Even after the creature tears off Krogh’s prosthetic arm, he manages to fire a number of bullets into the Monster.  And Doctor Frankenstein outdoes him by a swashbuckling rope swing that propels the Monster over the lip of a ledge and into a very convenient, bubbling pool of 800-degree F sulfur-bearing magma.

Alright.  It’s a silly movie.  But it’s a lot fun.  I’ve got a warm spot for this one.  All the hand waving to make the Monster’s existence “scientific” appeals to the ten-year-old kid in me.  They even go so far as to clarify that the “ray” that the original movie said was “beyond the ultraviolet” was actually cosmic rays.  Well, cosmic rays!  What more could you ask?  Highly recommended for ten-year-old boys and other folks who like a good monster movie in black and white.

The Black Cat (1934) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , ,

To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd.  Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen.  Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists.  They are too ridiculous to consider.

Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary.  They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination.  But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.

Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night.  Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel.  Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is.  Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite).  Here he is shown Karen’s embalmed body in a giant bell jar.  And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead.  Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast’s daughter isn’t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.

The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim.  Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice.  Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan’s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall.  Don’t ask me why such a room is part of the story.  The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features.  Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.

But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered.  Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive.  Joan sees this and starts screaming.  Peter finds a gun that Poelzig’s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him.  While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.

O, brother!  Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig’s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches.  And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top.  There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd.  And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff’s face, they show Lugosi’s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him.  This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be.  And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun.  Only for fans of the genre.

October Viewing – 5

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

I was all over the place deciding on what I should watch next, I considered two movies that are genuinely disturbing; “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs.”  I couldn’t decide between them so I put them aside.  Then I started watching “Carnival of Souls.”  But although that movie has some truly disturbing images, the majority of the film is so devoid of acting, interest or sympathetic characters that I turned it off in disgust.  I may go back to it later.  As I said it has some potent imagery but I just wasn’t in the mood to subject myself to its depressing banality.

I decided to watch the 1932 “The Mummy.”

Of course this is a movie I’ve already reviewed.  But I needed something fun and also, I wanted see what I could extract from it by giving it a pair of fresh eyes.  So, I tried to imagine what the crowd of 1932 would see in it.

I looked through some of the older and newer discussions about the production and what was common to them all was the link to the King Tutankhamen discovery in the 1920’s.  Apparently, that archeological discovery had been enormously popular with the general public and so the filmmakers were right in thinking that a horror movie that piggybacked on ancient Egypt was likely to be popular.

And so, they cobbled together the story line of the Egyptian priest who was buried alive for stealing the secret of resurrection from the sacred Scroll of Thoth to bring back to life his great love; the Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.  Of course, whenever Karloff chants the name in the movie it sounds like “ankhs and almonds.”  Which made me think of some kind of mummy-themed breakfast cereal like Count Chocula but more health conscious like Honey Nut Cheerios.

But I digress.

So, I could see the audience of young men and teenagers bringing their girls to be frightened by the monster and thereby getting to hug them for moral support.

But what about the modern audience?  Well, my favorite scene is the initial discovery of the mummy and the chest holding the scroll of Thoth.  In this scene the character played by Edward Van Sloane, the same actor who plays Professor Van Helsing in Dracula and Doctor Waldman in Frankenstein is once again warning the impetuous skeptics about the dangers of interfering in the dark arts.  But of course, the young archeologist opens the chest and begins reading the scroll and so, awakes Imhotep (Karloff) who absconds with the scroll and leaves shocked scientist laughing psychotically and headed for death in a strait jacket.

This is the only scene where we see Karloff in his mummy makeup.  It was well made.  He looked quite like a 4,000-year-old corpse.  After that the story goes downhill.  Twelve years later the British Museum expedition is back in Egypt but now the son of the previous expedition’s leader is in charge and after receiving a hint as to where to dig, by Ardath Bey (the mummy pretending to be a modern Egyptian), they dig up the undisturbed tomb of ankhs and almonds.  Once she is safely deposited in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities Ardath Bey begins to work at resurrecting his former love.  And by reading passages from the scroll, he is able to lure ankhs and almonds present reincarnation (a pretty half-English half-Egyptian girl who happens to be Edward Van Sloane’s medical patient).

She falls in love with the young archeologist and it’s a photo-finish to see if she ends up with Ardath Bey as a murdered but re-animated corpse like him or her modern self marrying the Englishman.  In the intervening struggle the older archeologist is murdered by Ardath Bey and hijinks ensue.  In the final showdown the girl remembers her past life and enough ancient Egyptian language to make a prayer to the statue of Isis to help her by zapping Imhotep with her ankh which both burns up the scroll of Thoth and turns the mummy into a pile of bones.

Being in my senior years I was disturbed to see how little concern the younger archeologist seemed to exhibit at his father’s death.  I mean sure, the guy was old but at least a day or two of mourning before proceeding with his pursuit of the hot-looking former Egyptian princess should have been a reasonable thought.  Well, that is the essence of life.  And she was pretty alluring in her more scantily clad scenes.  So, I guess I can cut him some slack.

All in all, it’s a decently entertaining film.  Allowances have to be made for the definition of scary a hundred years ago but it’s a fun film.  I’ll give it a thumbs up as a light-hearted October viewing.

Update:
War Pig commented:

I, too, am intrigued by what Americans found frightening a century ago. Of course with modern special effects a scary film from today would cause a stampede out the doors of a roaring twenties theater and a call for congress to ban or restrict such films. I also find it curious that naked bodies and other sexual scenes were made verboten while wholesale slaughter and bloodshed were allowed when the 1930s movie codes were mandated.

For me, simple shock and violence are moot. I want suspense. Old classics like Night Of The Demon, Black Sunday, Psycho, Night Of The Hunter or Hour Of The Wolf and Rashoman. There’s just something about black & White cinematography that lends itself to horror movies. Masters of the craft such as Bergman, Hitchcock, Brava and Kurosawa used it to great effect. Horror, and suspense, are best served in black and white where you have to concentrate on the story instead of the fancy effects.

photog replied

Yes, a century has removed all the taboos.  But as you say gore and shock don’t guarantee satisfaction with the product.  Engage our imagination and gore isn’t that important.

October Viewing – 3

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , , ,

And now a return to form.  Whereas Charles Laughton can make a “horror” movie into a semi-legitimate film, putting Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi into a movie ensures that the full Universal horror treatment will ensue.

The Black Cat was such a pairing.  Bela Lugosi is a German medical doctor who was taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and eighteen years later he is looking to take revenge on Karloff who was the German commander who sold his troops out before the battle.  Also, while Lugosi was in prison Karloff stole away his wife telling her that Lugosi was dead.  Lugosi comes back to the scene of the battle where strangely Karloff has built an art deco palace on the site of the fort that he had commanded.  Later on, we learn that the whole hill is still booby-trapped with dynamite.  Well, you never know when that might come in handy.

There is a young American couple honeymooning in this Hungarian locale (sure why not) and Lugosi befriends them and then because of a motor vehicle accident during a rain storm, Lugosi is forced to bring them both to Karloff’s house where the doctor performs minor medical procedures that require putting her under a powerful sedative that makes her somewhat prescient upon meeting Karloff.

While the Americans sleep that night Lugosi and Karloff have a conference and we find out that Lugosi’s wife died of “pneumonia” years before.  Unsurprisingly Karloff decided to have her embalmed and put on display in his basement.  Well, sure, who wouldn’t!  And if all that isn’t bad enough Karloff tells Lugosi that his young daughter also died.  Next, we find out that Karloff is a satanic priest and the next night is the new moon and he will be celebrating a black mass at which he wants to sacrifice the American girl to Satan or something.  Lugosi objects and Karloff offers to play a game of chess to see whether she will die.  And Lugosi loses.  Darn.  Meanwhile we discover that Lugosi’s daughter is not dead but is married to Karloff and living in the house they are in.  The American girl meets her but somehow Lugosi still hasn’t heard about her.

A lot of goofy stuff happens with Lugosi’s servant pretending to obey Karloff and the American man being trapped in a room that eventually he escapes by just opening the door.  And even though the satanic mass is quite crowded Lugosi somehow easily manages to rescue the American girl.  And then everyone heads down into the basement for the climax.

So, let’s see.  Lugosi stumbles on the dead body of his daughter.  Karloff and Lugosi get into a fight that ends when Lugosi’s fatally wounded servant helps him over power and chain up Karloff to a dungeon wall (yes dungeon).  Then Lugosi decides to finally revenge the deaths of his wife and daughter on Karloff by skinning him alive.  But when the American girl sees this going on she screams and her husband finds their location and mistaking Lugosi’s intention he shoots the doctor.    Lugosi calls him a fool but tells the American couple to rush out of the building and get away from the hill because he is about to set off the timer that will trigger the dynamite to blow up the satanists, Karloff and Lugosi.  And in the last scene the happy honeymooners continue their railway journey to Budapest.

This movie has so many hokey things going on.  Why would Karloff believe that Lugosi’s loyal servant would do his bidding instead of his master?  Why would Karloff still have the timer and detonator for the dynamite not only intact but on prominent display in his basement?  Why wouldn’t Lugosi have killed Karloff as soon as he saw his wife stuffed and mounted in Karloff’s basement?  Are all art deco architects, satanists?  Or are all satanists art deco devotees?  What did Lugosi’s morbid fear of black cats have to do with anything else in the movie except the title?  So many questions.

The strange thing is I enjoyed the movie.  Sure, it made no sense.  But there was a style and an energy to it that was fun.  You sort of knew the American couple would emerge unscathed so really, we were watching the duel between Lugosi and Karloff and we knew that some kind of justice would prevail.  And those lousy satanists would get blown up.

In a way, with its modernist architecture juxtaposed against the medieval stonework of the underground fort it was a perfect way for the modern (1930s) world to intrude on the gothic horror that is the stock in trade of the Universal horror movies.  Art deco horror.  Well done Bela and Boris.

Universal Classic Monster Movies – An OCF Classic Movie Review – Part 5 – The Mummy

photog Movie Reviews, OCF Classic Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , ,

Re-posted from October 2017

So far in this review, I have gone over the “Big Three” of the Classic Monster class.  Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman coexisted in a European setting even showing up in each other’ movies.  Very cozy.  Maybe almost too much of a good thing.  I mean after you have the Daughter of Dracula and the Bride and the Son of Frankenstein what’s left, the Wolfman’s Gardener’s Chiropractor?  It would almost be a relief to escape from foggy, chilly Central Europe and head for a warmer and dryer climate.

Egypt?

The Mummy presents an intersection of interesting subjects.  At the time, it was made (1932) less than 10 years had elapsed since the real-life discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb and the golden artifacts it contained.  This discovery along with the supposed “Tutankhamen’s Curse” upon all those who desecrated his tomb re-invigorated the public’s interest in Egyptology.  Add to that the fascination with a strange and exotic world such as the Middle East would have presented to Westerners of a century ago.  And finally mix this together with a mythical love story to produce a strange fantasy to lure the public with.  And the movie was very popular, even in Britain, where the colonial setting was probably of interest.

The story goes like this.  A British archeological dig in Egypt uncovers an unspoiled burial site that contains a mummy that was not embalmed but rather buried alive.  Markings on the tomb warn any grave robbers that the occupant is a cursed individual and anyone who reads the  Scroll of Thoth will perish and unleash an undead horror on the world.  So of course, they read the scroll.  This activates the long dead mummy of Imhotep, the priest who was punished for trying to use the Scroll of Thoth to revivify his lover  Anck-es-en-Amon, the princess whose untimely death brought about this whole tragedy.  After driving one of the expedition mad and sending him to an early grave, Imhotep (played by our old friend Boris Karloff) escapes with the scroll and disappears.  Ten years later Helen Grosvenor, the daughter of one of the surviving expedition members, is discovered by Imhotep to be the reincarnated spirit of Anck-es-en-Amon.  By this time Imhotep has assumed the identity of a modern-day Egyptian named Ardath Bey.  He plans to ritually slay Helen, mummify her and use the Scroll of Thoth to revivify her and make her his bride.  Pretty creepy.

Helen’s friends and family attempting to foil this plot are laughably ineffective.  At the end it takes Helen’s returned memory as Anck-es-en-Amon to appeal to Isis (whose votary she was) to put a stop to the ritual murder.  Imhotep is blasted by divine intervention and everyone (who is still alive at this point) lives happily ever after.

One interesting addition to the cast is our old friend Edward Van Sloan as Dr. Muller.  In this movie his effectiveness is somewhere between the high competency of Van Helsing in Dracula and the incredible incompetence of Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein.  Let’s give him a B- in the Mummy for at least putting up a fight.

I’ve always enjoyed the Mummy.  But I limit myself to one viewing every ten years.  Let’s face it.  A Mummy, even one with a scroll that bestows the power of life and death isn’t that scary.  For all it’s flaws the 1990s reboot with Brendan Fraser has a lot more chills in it with man eating scarab beetles and a Mummy that revivifies himself by stealing organs from the living.  But the 1930s version is solid entertainment well worth seeing, at least once.