Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

M.10rda - where did you watch that? youtube?

I believe I DL'd EERIE/UNCANNY TALES from Youtube. The quasi-remake from 1932 is also on Youtube!

EERIE TALES aka THE LIVING DEAD aka UNCANNY TALES aka UNHEIMLICHE GESCHICHTEN (1932):
Writer/director Richard Oswald gives 1919's "Uncanny Tales" another go, remaking two of the shorts from the original - Poe's ubiquitous "Chat Noir" and RLStephenson's "Suicide Club" - and adding two new ones, Poe's "Doctor Tarr" and an anonymous thing about a wax museum. Unfortunately, Oswald has none of the original (and exceptional) leads from the earlier film. What he does have is sync dialogue and Paul Wegener, best known as "The Golem"! And, more importantly, he's got a very fresh take on the idea of an "anthology": instead of a bunch of unrelated stories framed by a loose linking sequence, the four stories or (perhaps more appropriately) chapters of the new EERIE TALES all occur consecutively and involve the same two main characters. So - y'know - it becomes almost a "regular" narrative!       And I dug it!

The film begins w/ Wegener as some kind of eccentric inventor who gets cheesed off at his wife and her pet kitty, and you know the rest. (Good news for animal lovers: NO harm whatsoever comes to the cat in this version, besides of course the loss of its owner.) A do-gooder journalist happens to be passing Wegener's house during the grisly deed, tries to investigate, and eventually the cops join him... at no point does this Poe adaptation end... instead, Wegener flees culpability, runs into a closed wax museum, the journalist follows, and - voila, Chapter Two!

That one's quick, but the next one (based on "Doctor Tarr") is long, elaborate, and - really great. Wegener next seeks figurative asylum in a literal asylum, and again his pursuer pursues. Some weird stuff is afoot in that asylum, however, and it puts one of the leads in danger while giving the other a bit of an advantage. The best moments in this E/UT are in this third chapter. The acting by the denizens of the asylum is terrific and there are many very weird, awkward, over-the-top bizarre, and (yes) "eerie" bits - a couple times Oswald legitimately achieves a Lynchian quality of the unheimliche!

At last, the journalist's pursuit of the homicidal scientist reaches a climax in the "Suicide Club" chapter. Oswald really builds this one out from the shorter version in the '19 film, providing more characterization for the members of the club (with, again, more strong acting) and much better FX. The resolution lacks a bit of the punch of the original's, but that's a small quibble. More significantly I really miss Conrad Veidt and his incredible emotive face, but Wegener (who looks like the most nightmarish possible offspring of a union between Jack Palance and Harvey Keitel) is a compellingly ghoulish bad guy. The dude who plays the journalist isn't great though he does nice work in the asylum scenes. I really love the idea of an anthology where each story follows the previous, and Oswald pulls it off well. It makes one think what Tarantino and friends could've accomplished if they'd taken FOUR ROOMS remotely seriously. Good on Oswald for trying something novel (and succeeding) instead of just taking the money and doing a shot-for-shot w/ sound!

4/5
The film is often known as THE LIVING DEAD, for some reason. (There are no living dead in the film.)