Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics DVD
"With a few exceptions," wrote Andrew Sarris in You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, "The Bride of Frankenstein represented the last gasp of the horror film as a serious genre. The creeping disease of facetiousness crippled the genre even more distressingly than it had the gangster film. The dilution of creativity proceeded apace in both genres with anachronistic wise-cracking, farcical reactions, low-brow skepticism, and ‘darky’ caricatures. Warners even promoted the miscegenation of genres with gangsters and ghouls, electric chairs, and haunted graveyards…"
If those lines rouse your curiosity as to just what those films from the horror genre’s declining years might have been like, let me direct your attention to Warner’s new "Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics" two-disc box. Divided into a Boris Karloff-themed disc and a Bela Lugosi-themed disc, this set digs up some of the stars’ lesser-known films. Unfortunately, sometimes obscure films are obscure for a reason — none of the movies in this Horror Classics set are exactly essential, and only one of them is really worth seeing at all.
The Karloff disc starts off with The Walking Dead (1936), a slight but fun curiosity in the lively, streetwise Warner Bros. style. Directed by Michael Curtiz and borrowing equally from the gangster, horror, and nascent sci-fi genres (something which bothers me much less than it apparently does Sarris), the film follows John Ellman (Karloff), a pianist sent to the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. His innocence is proven literally seconds after the switch is thrown, but he’s brought back to life thanks to the timely intervention of Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn).
Initially amnesiac, Ellman’s memory is jogged when he plays a piece of music from his past, and he then stalks the criminals responsible for setting him up. They all meet with various fear-inspired deaths (one has a heart attack, one stumbles backward out of a window, and so forth) and Ellman himself is eventually sent back to the grave by the last of his dying victims. The whole thing ends with the doctor being chastened for bringing Ellman back in the first place with the "how dare we meddle in God’s affairs?" nonsense typical of that era’s horror movies.
Curtiz keeps things lean and snappy, breaking from his workmanlike style for just one great midpoint scene in which Ellman recognizes his antagonists for the first time — the camera ominously pushes in on the guilty men and a sudden intensification of the lighting illuminates the very sweat of their brows. Karloff is excellent as the initially put-upon and bewildered, then menacing and spooky sad sack of the title. Although The Walking Dead is no masterpiece, fans of either Karloff or of 30s’ films won’t want to miss this one.
To say that Frankenstein 1970 is also no masterpiece is putting it charitably. Too bad, since its central premise is actually kind of intriguing. The last surviving descendant of the Frankenstein name (Karloff again) agrees to allow a television crew to shoot a program in the family castle; he, of course, plans to use the money from this deal to replicate his ancestor’s famous experiment. It’s never made clear if the story is supposed to be taking place in 1970 — the film was released in 1958 — but Frankenstein 1970 does try to update the familiar mythology by mixing its gothic trappings with references to the Holocaust and atomic technology. But details like these will probably only stick in your mind if you’re watching with a pen and notebook in your hand; otherwise, the entire snail-paced mush is likely to put you to sleep.
Too much of Frankenstein 1970 consists of long scenes of Karloff hobbling confusedly around his lab; his attempts to liven things up by constantly grimacing and scowling and gnawing on scenery don’t amount to much. The monster appears to have an overturned bucket on his head and spends the film wrapped in bandages, resembling the Mummy more than the classic Jack Pierce-designed creature immortalized by Karloff. The whole thing seems to last much longer than its 80 minutes and is recommended to completists only.
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Tags: Boris Karloff, Classic Movies, DVDs, Film Reviews, Frankenstein 1970, Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics, Michael Curtiz, The Walking Dead
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