| Product: |
The Monster Legacy (DVD) |
| Date: |
21.10.07 (172 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A decent collection of classic horrors
Disadvantages: Some poor films included, some great films missing, some pointless busts
Ah, sweet hubris. Here I am with a boxset containing 17 films, sundry extras and, er, three decorative busts, and I now find myself trying to review it effectively without boring you to tears.
Universal was the Hollywood studio that made the most memorable horror films in the 1930s. You’ll know something of them even if you’ve never seen any of the films; their versions of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman are definitive.
This set contains a number of DVDs that are separately available as double-disk editions. I’ve reviewed a couple of them already, so that’ll save a bit of space here. The set adds a number of other films to what was already available. And some busts. ‘Hand-cast in polystone’, whatever that is, and allegedly ‘museum quality’, you get Karloff’s monster, Lugosi’s Drac and Chaney’s werewolf. They’re rubbish and probably added at least £40 onto the price of the set. I’m actually embarrassed to own them, and I’m a man who spent £30 on a Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze poster.
The films are dividable into roughly four categories. First up is Dracula. The original was made in 1931 and starred Hungarian Bela Lugosi. It was directed by Tod Browning, America’s only important silent horror director, and shot by ace German cameraman Karl Freund. Unfortunately it’s not very good. The first 15 minutes or so are decent, containing Transylvania, a castle, cobwebs, vampire brides and armadillos. But as soon as the Count arrives in England the film nosedives. We get terrible cockney accents, women who look like drag queens and some of the most risible bats-on-wires you’ll ever see. And my god, it’s slow! Most of the scenes involve ten-minute conversations in drawing rooms. Everything exciting takes place off screen.
Lugosi’s performance is entirely bizarre. His gestures are those of a top-class stage ham; he exists in complete isolation, never seeming like he’s reacting to anyone else on screen; and his line readings beggar belief. “Wewill be leawing… tooMAHHHrow… EEvninng.” The film’s one plus point is Dwight Frye as Dracula’s loopy ally Renfield. He acts his arse off, and the two genuinely creepy moments in the film are entirely down to him.
There are three more Dracula films. The Spanish language remake is much more entertaining than the English version, with kinetic cameras, inventive framing and feminine women. The guy playing Dracula looks like a hamster, but it’s heaps better than the Lugosi version. Dracula’s Daughter (1936) has the Count’s tormented offspring turn to a dishy psychiatrist to cure her vampirism. Gloria Holden is striking in the lead role and has cinema’s first ever lesbian vampire scene, albeit a tame one. But it’s a dull film enlivened only by a hilarious trip to Transylvania in the final reel. Son of Dracula (1943) has the count move to America as the people there have ‘stronger’ blood (rather an unfortunate detail given what was happening in Europe at the time). He’s played by the hulking Lon Chaney Jr, an actor to whom subtlety was but a word. It’s another dull film, although it’s kind of kinky that his female victim *wants* to be turned into a vampire, and there are some half decent special effects.
Then we have Frankenstein films. James Whale’s hugely influential original from 1931 is still very watchable. Visually it’s superb (Whale borrowed heavily from silent German cinema), and there’s some great acting by Boris Karloff as the monster and Dwight Frye as the hunchback. Colin Clive is a good Frankenstein, if too English and fey. I reviewed it already, along with its brilliant sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Bride, Whale’s masterpiece, is about the best horror film made before 1968 and seems astonishingly modern, with its screamingly camp mad scientists, gratuitous crucifixion imagery and the fact that the monster acquires a fondness for cigars and gin.
Son Of Frankenstein (1939) has Basil Rathbone continuing his father’s work in a busy film which includes Karloff’s last appearance as the monster, Lionel Atwill as a vengeful policeman and Bela Lugosi on great form as a ferocious shepherd. It has some excellent sets, all distorted angles and twisted trees. Unfortunately it has the most annoying child in film history, Frankenstein’s young son, who can’t act and spoils the film’s otherwise exciting conclusion. It’s too long, but is generally a good film. Sadly the follow up, Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), is poor. Lugosi and Atwill are strangely bland. Lon Chaney is a woeful monster, making you realise just how good Karloff was, and Frankenstein himself is played by the carved-from-solid-oak Sir Cedric Hardwicke (I can only assume his knighthood had nothing to do with acting). It all has something to do with brain transplants, but I found it impossible to keep my interest up.
Then there are the ‘miscellaneous monsters’. The Mummy, from 1932, is strangely disappointing. Karloff is the reanimated Ancient Egyptian, but after a lovely beginning he discards his bandages and skulks around with a wrinkled face and a fez looking for his lost love. There’s one really effective moment in a museum at night, but otherwise this is a slow film that could have done with less talk and more mummy.
The Invisible Man (1933) is directed by James Whale and contains a great performance by Claude Rains in the title role. It has a sense of humour that still works and the special effects are surprisingly good. I reviewed it previously, but suffice to say that it’s one of the best films on here. The Phantom of the Opera (1943) is a dreary, overlong Technicolor monstrosity in which the emphasis is far more on the opera than on Rains’ rather wet phantom. It’s the film that ultimately led to the Lloyd Webber atrocity, as it turned the story into a turgid romance rather than the twisted little story of revenge, lust and music that it should be.
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) doesn’t really belong in this set – it’s almost a decade too late and doesn’t have the same gothic feel. Some scientists looking for fossils in South America get more than they bargained for when they encounter an aggressive amphibious creature. The monster design is inventive but the film is bogged down by interminable underwater sequences; a dull cast of genre stereotypes; and incidental music so shriekingly unsubtle that it eliminates any possible suspense. It becomes rather a struggle to get through the full 73 minutes.
Werewolf of London (1935) has Henry Hull playing a scientist who falls foul of a werewolf in Tibet. Returning to London, his preoccupation with his experiments and, um, nocturnal troubles, cause his wife to seek comfort elsewhere. This is an enjoyable oddity. The werewolf makeup is minimalist, but it’s better than the more famous Wolfman makeup. There’s too much bad comic relief, and the main character is unlikeable and stupid, but Hull’s performance is astoundingly similar to the (much later) Irish actor Patrick Magee, one of the most brilliantly weird performers in film history, so that alone makes this worth a look.
She-Wolf of London (1946) really doesn’t belong on this set at all. Set in the early 1900s, it seems that a werewolf is attacking people in the local park, but is all as it seems? (No.) This film is dire. You will guess exactly what’s going on after about eight minutes, but you really, really won’t care. It’s obviously trying for some of the intelligent suspense that Val Lewton was bringing to his work for RKO at the time, but contains nothing that’s scary or even interesting. It lurches into out-and-out Hitchcock rip-off to desperately try to liven up the last five minutes.
The daddy of all werewolf films is The Wolf Man (1941). Sadly, the hero, Larry Talbot, is played by the hulking Lon Chaney Jr, a man who would have been absolutely perfect as a dumb gangster, but who’s well out of his depth as the Welsh nobleman he’s supposed to be. He’s about twice the size of Claude Rains, his supposed father. While pitching some hamfisted woo at a local lovely he has a run in with a werewolf and soon starts experiencing the usual dreary sexual metaphors whenever there’s a full moon. It’s the template for pretty much every werewolf film made since, but it wasn’t until the 80s that anyone figured out how to do this with any wit. A potentially tragic tale is blown due to the miscasting of Chaney and, in spite of some nice visual ambience, this one is nowhere near essential viewing.
The final category of film is what you might call the ‘monster mash’. Having run out of ideas, Universal in the 40s churned out a last few horrors in which their various tired monster franchises met up to have fights. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) is a weirdly disjointed effort, spending 20 minutes in Cardiff before moving to ‘Europe’. Chaney is still bad as the Larry the wolfman, but compared to most everyone else on offer he’s practically Olivier. Two down-on-their-luck horror actors, Atwill and Lugosi, are woefully miscast, especially Lugosi, who this time gets to play the Frankenstein monster (although it’s blatantly a stuntman a lot of the time). He just lumbers about as if he’s constipated with his arms stuck out, looking like he’s wondering where his career went wrong. The film’s crowning stupidity is a musical number involving singing peasants. It’s actually quite a loveable film, in the same way that a dog with three legs is loveable. It’s awkward and graceless, but you have a certain sympathy for it nonetheless.
House of Frankenstein (1944) is a hoot. It crams an amazing amount into just over an hour and has more ageing horror stars than any other film in the set. We have Karloff as a mad scientist, Chaney as the wolfman and Atwill as another inspector; they’re joined by John Carradine as Dracula, George Zucco as a travelling showman, and J Carroll Naish as a hunchback. Add to that the Frankenstein monster, torch wielding mobs and a dancing gypsy girl (you see her knickers!) and you have one crazy little film. The dialogue ranges from clumsy (“Why have you freed me from the ice that imprisoned the beast that lives within me?”) to clumsier (“She hates me because I’m an ugly hunchback!”) and clumsiest (“Don’t go this way! Quicksand! Quicksand!”). Karloff is quite good – he could elevate the most worthless material – but no one is taking things seriously and it’s a lot of fun.
Sadly House of Dracula (1945) is nowhere near as much fun. Dracula, the wolfman and the monster all end up at a doctor’s castle, looking to be cured. It’s slow and not silly enough to hold the interest. The same old worn-out cast – Chaney, Carradine, Atwill – just aren’t trying anymore, and the only novelty is a female hunchback. Sadly that was pretty much it for the Universal classic monsters, although they did all get to meet Abbott and Costello (sadly not in this set).
There are decent documentaries about all the main films featuring a combination of film historians, survivors and offspring of long-dead actors. There are also a number of film-historian commentaries, which aren’t so engaging. The usual mix of rather drab stills and trailers is complemented by a few oddities, such as Philip Glass’s modern soundtrack for Dracula. The best extra is an informative and entertaining documentary about all aspects of Universal horror directed by Kevin Brownlow and narrated by Kenneth Branagh. It doesn’t go into the same depth as the individual-film documentaries but it’s a great overview. The picture quality on the films themselves is a little disappointing – surely *some* of these films must have been restored?
I suppose the ultimate test for horror films is whether they’re scary or not. These are not. I think the set’s 15 certificate comes from clips of later films in the documentaries rather than any of the films themselves. There’s the odd uncanny moment, but there are no sustained fright sequences and obviously no gore. I like these old films for their atmosphere and their sense of visual style (although that was lost in most of the films made after 1940). A few of them are still genuinely very good (the James Whale films). Others have dated badly. Most people will be put off by the oldness, the black-and-white-ness, the slow pacing and the lack of recognisable actors. But most of the films are at least watchable. It’s for the horror completist, I guess, rather than the general viewer.
The main complaint with this set is what’s missing. This could have been definitive, but it misses six or seven key films, most obviously The Old Dark House, The Black Cat and everything silent. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re going to include She Wolf of London then you must be aiming for *some* kind of completeness, so why skimp on the genuine classics?
The other complaint is those damn busts, which make this ‘collectable’, thus pushing up the price. This retails for £85, although you can get it for about half that on amazon. There’s a lot of dross on here, but enough great horrors and enjoyable fripperies to make it worth a look, even if most people won’t want to actually buy it. I doubt I’ve done any of the films here justice, but this review’s already twice as long as it should be.
Summary: Stupid busts knock the price up on a classic horror boxset
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