Well, catch up time! I enjoyed a lot in October, but computer troubles prevented reporting on it until now. For starters, lets look at the old school monster movies.
I got ripped off with this one. I was supposed to be buying The Legacy Collection of the Wolf-Man, but it only came with this movie. Oh well.
Anyway, The Wolf Man stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, a meek man who turns into a werewolf after being bitten. I've seen the more recent version, but this was my first brush with the Universal version. One thing I like about these movies is that they're short, usually not more than 70 minutes, which means it tells the basic story. Though I suppose part of the trade off is I'm not as invested in the characters as I was in the newer version, but there you go.
The effects are good for the 1930s, and it's aged pretty well. Though part of me was thinking back to that episode of Freakazoid where a werewolf goes to him to try and be cured. (I had that problem with Frankenstein too, but we'll discuss that later.)
All in all, good if you have an hour and a half to kill, and I'm looking forward to the sequels.
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Well, here we are. After having it sit on my shelf for awhile, I decided this Halloween I was going to pull this set down from the shelf and watch the entire Frankenstein series.
Frankenstein
One of the movies in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, this little tale based on Mary Shelley's novel is one of those movies that's been parodied to death. The entire time I was watching, I was thinking of Phineas and Ferb, and Johnny Bravo, or in Gargoyles when Xanatos and Demona created Coldstone. There are a few things that people get wrong, like the hunchback being named Fritz, not Igor, but for the most part you know the story.
I just thought it was okay. It felt... incomplete. What is was missing was found in the the next movie.
Bride of Frankenstein
Also in 1001 Movies..., this is like a second half of the first movie in some ways. It adapts some concepts from the novel the first movie left out, like the Monster meeting and befriending a blind man, or Frankenstein making the titular bride.
The Bride is one of the classic Universal movie monsters, so it might surprise you to know she only shows up in the last few minutes of this film, and in none of the sequels. But what's here is good. The above mentioned scene with the blind man is about as emotional as this series gets. It's very well done. I also like that for the first time there's a clear cut villain in Dr. Petorious, though I want to know what the point of the little men in jars was.
Only real complaint? Why did the Bride just reject the Monster? She just screams. Eh...
Son of Frankenstein
This movie begins a pattern: someone has the monster, blackmails/convinces a Frankenstein into doing something with it, it goes bad. Here, it's Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi, a former assistant of Frankenstein that we never see in the earlier movies, trying to convince Frankenstein's son Wolf into fixing the monster. Wolf agrees, thinking he can redeem his family name by showing what good the experiments can do, buy Ygor plans to use the Monster to get back at the jury that sentenced him to hang.
At an hour and forty minutes, this is the longest of the movies, and it tends to drag, but I liked it. This introduces some interesting characters, not just Ygor but an inspector with one arm. There a bit of dark humor there, obviously.
The Ghost of Frankenstein
I remember an episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo where they were watching The Son of the Bride of the Ghost of Frankenstein, or something to that effect. Now I've seen all three movies that make up that title. Yay!
Blah blah, the Monster gets free, Ygor takes it to Frankenstein's other son to get it fixed, yadda yadda. Even in the early days horror movies followed formula. Probably a good thing the proper series ended here, and the rest were crossovers.
House of Frankenstein
This is a sequel to Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man, which is a movie on the Wolf Man set. It brings together all three major movie monsters... kind of.
The first part is almost a separate movie. Another old assistant of Frankenstein breaks out of jail with a hunchback assistant and kills a traveling carnival worker, who has Dracula's coffin. He's revived (not played by Bela Lugosi, sadly) and agrees to help the scientist before dying in sunlight.
The second part has them coming across Frankenstein's castle, where they find Larry and the Monster embedded in the ice, and once freed Larry agrees to help in exchange for a cure.
I kind of like how there's no clear cut good guy here. Everyone, Larry included, acts selfishly. All of them (spoiler alert) die in quick succession at the end, almost like the movie was in a hurry to wrap itself up.
All in all, good horror history, but I don't think I need to watch it again.
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