Chainsawmidget and the Universal Monsters.

[Rev. Powell]

Ghost of Frankenstein. 

 

Okay, weird thing here.  In Son of Frankenstein, Wolf Frankenstein was married to a woman named Elsa.  In this movie, the other son has a daughter named Elsa.  Kinda bizarre. 

And "Bride of Frankenstein" starred a woman named Elsa.

[M.10rda]

Oh boy, did it ever!     

I don't recall ever watching SON OF... but I've seen GHOST OF..., and although I didn't like it too much, I still liked Bela plenty. Whenever anyone suggests that Bela "wasn't trying" et al, it always makes me admire him a little bit more. I'll take Bela Not Trying over many other actors Trying any day!

[chainsaw midget]

The Invisible Agent


Here we once again stray from the horror and even the monster aspect.  Our Invisible Man is a war hero.  When Nazis and a very wonderful and sadistic Peter Lorre (who actually plays a Japanese man here, yeah, I know...) track down the grandson of the original Invisible Man and threaten his life for the formula, he instead agrees to become the Invisible Man for the US military. 

This is very much a wartime propaganda movie, but it's not a bad one.  Our hero is actually shown to be somewhat bad at his job.  The fact that he can't resist playing pranks on a Nazi leaders or eating right out in the open where he can be seen immediately cause him problems and nearly blow everything.  Likewise, the Nazis seems to be very on the ball and quite competent, which was a rarity back then, even if they do still feel the need to constantly backstab each other. 

And some of the Invisible effects are just great.  Especially the scene where he's in the bath lathering up his invisible body with soap.   

[RCMerchant]

I wasn't wild about GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN either. Or SON OF DRACULA. Chaney is wonderful as the wolfman, but a little too well feed to be a walking corpse or a vampire. Don't get me wrong! I love Lon Chaney! OF MICE AND MEN (1939) is a classic! "I like the dogs, George!"
As far as SON OF FRANKENSTEIN- yeh. That hits all the buttons.

[chainsaw midget]

The Mummy's Tomb

It's a movie. 

The Tomb doesn't really play any important part in the Mummy's Tomb.  Mostly the Mummy goes around strangling people with one hand.  In the Mummy's Hand, the main character discover the mummy's tomb.  Seems like the titles on these two movies could be switched. 

Anyway, the mummy's tomb starts 30 years after the Mummy's Hand, and spends the first 10 minutes (of a 60 minute film) showing footage from that movie while the main character gives us a "Previously on The Mummy" explanation. 

So, 30 years later the High Priest (who DIDN'T die when he got shot in the Mummy's Hand) decides to seek revenge against the people who desecrated the tomb.  He passes his title, and his mummy over to a new High Priest that moves to America and sicks the Mummy on the family of the guys from the first movie. 

The may be the first movie to utilize that tried and true horror sequel cliche of bringing back the cast from the first movie only to kill them early on. 

Other than that, the Mummy just kind of walks around alot.  There are some pretty long shots of the mummy just walking and Chaney doesn't exactly bring a lot to the role.  There is a decent fight in a burning building though. 

Oh, and there's also one scene where you can clearly see the "tombstones" blowing in the wind. 

I mean, if you have to watch a monster movie, this is a monster movie, but it's not exactly one I'd highly recommend. 

[chainsaw midget]

Frankenstein meets the Wolfman

One one hand, this feels back to classic standards.  Mad science, castles, angry mobs, old villages, mist, and all that fun stuff. 

On the other hand, the editing of this did Bela wrong.  We'll get to that in a second. 

The movie starts with grave robbers exposing Larry Talbotts non-decayed body to moon light where he comes to life again.  As good as he was in the last movie, he's even better here as a man who is completely lost and without hope.  All he wants to do is die, but he knows the curse of the Wolfman won't even let him do that for good. 

After a brief hospitalization, he tracks down Maleva, the old gypsy woman from the previous movie for help.  She tells him that she knows a doctor that's able to help people that are otherwise beyond help.  Dr. Frankenstein. 

What she doesn't know is ... well, what's been going on in the Frankenstein movies.  The doctor is dead.  His lab was blown up.  The monster is frozen in ice.  Let's talk about the monster for a brief moment. 

When last we saw the Frankenstein, he had Ygor's brain put in his body and was blind.  This movie makes no mention of either.  Apparently, they were going to, that's why they had Lugosi as the monster, but for whatever reason the cut all of Lugosi's lines.  So there's no explanation for why he's walking around with his hands stretched out. 

Anyway, back to the Wolfman. With the help of a doctor and the Baroness Elsa Frankenstein (the daughter Elsa, not the wife Elsa) they plan on using Dr. Frankenstein's notes to drain the life energy out of the Wolfman and let him die, and they'll do the same with the Frankenstein's Monster.  However like all good doctors in these movies, he goes a little nuts and decided that he absolutley has to see what Frankenstein is like at full power. 

There is a very brief shot of Bela as the Monster smiling wickedly as he realizes he's getting restored, and it is wonderfully chilling.  It makes one wonder what the movie would have been life if they had allowed Bela to really play the Monster like he played Ygor. 

Anyway though, there's a full moon, the two monsters fight, and a particularly angry villager (one's who's even angrier and madder than your average angry villager) decided to BLOW UP THE DAM and let the water destroy what's left of Frankenstein's lab.  And the two monsters are swept away in the waters. 

This is a fun one.  I'd put it right up there with the other classics. 

OH!  and I almost forgot to mention, the movie actually has a surprisingly catch musical number.

[M.10rda]

Initially seeing that title made me think I should revisit this one (after decades!) to enjoy it and Bela again. Then you reminded me of why I haven't revisited it in decades. I just watched a Universal "monster" movie starring Lugosi which I bet isn't in your set, and it reminded me of the worst kind of Lugosi role - the one that denies him the ability to do anything interesting whatsoever. Those are hard to watch, and when people claim Bela was a "bad" actor, maybe those are the films (FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN included) that they're talking about.

[chainsaw midget]

Don't get me wrong.  It's a good enjoyable movie.  It's just not a good Bela Lugosi movie. 

[chainsaw midget]

The Phantom of the Opera
(Claude Rains version) 

A Universal Monsters movie in Technicolor?  Madness!

I mean, it looks pretty but ... weird. 

There's some great costumes.  A little too much singing for my tastes.  It doesn't really feel very monster-y or horror-ish though.  Is Technicolor Extravaganza a genre?  Because that's what it feels like. 

Claude Rains isn't exactly the best Phantom.  I think the problem is that we know too much about the character.  We see him before he's the Phantom and he's just some guy.  Then we see pretty much his entire career as "the Phantom" and really nobody ever believes he's a phantom.  He's just a murderer that's hidden in the Opera house and has the keys to everything.  There's no real mystery to the character. 

He's got a nice design though.

Not a horrible movie, but just not one I'd recommend if you're looking for monsters. 

[chainsaw midget]

Son of Dracula

There's been a lot of debate as to whether Lon Chaney played the actual Dracula in this movie or not.  While they do refer to him as "Count Dracula" and say Alucard is not his name, to me that says nothing.  Of course Dracula would be his name if he was the son of Dracula.  Dracula is a last name.  Plus I have a hard time seeing this guy as the same character Bela Lugosi played, and most importantly, this movie is called "Son of Dracula."  It's not Dracula Returns.  It's not Revenge of Dracula.  It's not Dracula is Back-ula.

Now as for the movie itself, the plot is that "Count Alucard" has been invited to America by the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner.  The day he arrives, the owner dies and leaves the plantation to her.  Soon after, she married Alucard, much to the dismay of her actual boyfriend. 

Seems she planned on using Alucard for immortality, and then planned to have him finished off so she can live forever with her boyfriend, which is an interesting plot.  Things go wrong however when he boyfriend tries to confront Alucard and shoots him multiple times.  The bullets go through Alucard and kill his girl instead and he flees and eventually confesses to her murder. 

And of course while this is going on, we have people investigating that highly suspect Alucard is a vampire. 

The special effects in this movie take it up a notch from what we typically expect.  We actually see Lon Chaney turn into mist and back again, as well as transforming into a bat.  Even the bat is a lot more advanced the previous rubber bat on a string effect. 

There's a lot of people that don't like Lon Chaney's portrayal of the vampire.  Admittedly there are a few times where it seems like they wanted him to have a Bela Lugosi style sense of dread and foreboding, and he can't pull that off, but there are also moments when he gets to play things a different way.  Lon Chaney was a big guy, and Alucard the vampire often comes off as physically imposing with a monstrous brute strength. For that, he does good, but as somebody that's supposed to be foreign royalty, he seems awfully American. 

One of the bigger problems I have is that they seem to play their hand much too quick in allowing people to figure out who or what Alucard really is.   

[chainsaw midget]

The Invisible Man's Revenge

I've tried to write out a post for this movie a few times.  Each time, it turns into a rambling summary of the plot.  There's an Invisible Man.  He tries to get his revenge. 

Our Invisible Man here isn't a megalomaniac or even a scientist.  He's just kind of a low rent scuzz.  The type you would expect to see in a gangster movie.  The movie isn't terrible or anything.  It's even got John Carradine in it as the required mad scientist.  It's just not very memorable.  It does have an invisible dog in it though. 

Oh and in case you were ever wondering, to do a complete blood transfusion, draining all the blood from one person and putting it into another apparently only takes a small pump and a length of hose. 

[chainsaw midget]

The Mummy's Ghost

There isn't a Mummy's Ghost in this movie, but it does have some other notable things going for it. 

As a villain, the Mummy isn't given much to do and it's performance isn't exactly standout.  Apparently it survived the fire from the last movie, and the High Priest is using it again to try to bring the mummy of the Egyptian Princess back to her tomb in Egypt.  That doesn't sound like to terrible a goal, except for all the murdering they're doing. 

Also an Egpytian woman is somehow linked to the mummy.  When they go to get the body of the princess, it disappears and they comment on how her soul has taken a new form. 

What is notable in this movie is that the "heroes" do nothing to defeat the villains, the High Priest is slain by the Mummy for his betrayal, and then he takes the Egyptian Woman who's aging and drying out rapidly and they sink into the swamp together.  Yeah, the girl, the main love interest, actually DIES at the end of this one. 

Other than that, she probabaly wears some of the most form fitting clothing in the Universal Monsters series.  In one scene you can clearly see her nipples poking up.  Seems rather unheard of back then. 

Also the movie has genuine blood in it.  There's a scene where Lon Chaney actually manages to cut himself for real and blood splashes up on his mummy mask. 

Honestly, the Mummy movies have always felt somewhat lacking, after the first one with Boris Karloff, but this one has enough of a twist on the tale to make it worthwhile.

[chainsaw midget]

House of Frankenstein

In many ways this is both a sequel and a retread of Frankenstein meets the Wolfman.  The basic frame work of a gypsy and Larry Talbot seeking Frankenstein to solve his issues remains.  However the details have changed and the performances make all the difference. 

First thing though, I have to mention, Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula are all in this movie.  None of them share any scenes together.  Dracula barely has anything to do with the plot and is killed off the first half hour. 

Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff (who plays the mad scientist here) play wonderfully off each other.  For the first part of the movie, I was thinking how Boris was acting circles around everybody else until Chaney showed up. 

The gypsy girl provided a wonderful contrast, her cheerfulness against Chaney's depression brought out the strenghts in both performances.  Her love triangle with the wolfman and the hunchback also helped provide a good emotional hook. 

On the bad side, I just don't think John Carradine feels like a good Dracula.  Nothing in the character really feels foreign.  He doesn't even have the physical attributes that Chaney had in Son of Dracula to make the character stand out. 

[chainsaw midget]

Mummy's Curse. 

The last of the classic Lon Chaney mummy movies, and at this point, it feels like they're using suing the same plot over and over again, which is a shame because they start with a rather unique hook. 


In the last movie, we watch the main girl age away and die as the mummy carries her into the swamp.  That was in Massachusetts.  For some reason they're now in Louisianan ad it's 25 years later.  While clearing the swamp, the mummy is once again unleashed (with the help of the standard Egyptian cultists).  He reall doesn't look like he's spent 25 years buried in a swamp. 

The interesting part though, is that the woman from the last movie always wakes up.  She crawls out of the mud in an actual cool looking sequence.  Then she washes herself off but has no idea who she is anymore.  Just that she seems to know a lot about Egyptian history.  It's a pretty cool angle actually.  Especially since we know that the whole reason the Mummy exists is because of the love of the Egyptian Princess (the one she's reincarnated as.)  You'd expect him to react more to that, but he just follows orders as usual, going through the motions of strangling people, carrying a woman away, and laying her on a stone slab.  And once AGAIN the Egyptian's plans are screwed over because of some last minute lusting on their part. 

The movie ends with the woman dead YET AGAIN and the Mummy buried under some stone.  However, this time, everyone who knew the secret to raising the mummy is now dead. 

On that note... where do they keep getting the Tana leaves they need to resurrect the mummy?  Apparently the plant itself was long extinct in the last movie.  Now it's another 25 years later and they still seem to have a lot. 

[M.10rda]

Good point about the Tana Leaves. I also always enjoy lore that involves bodies being preserved while submerged in swamps. I suppose somewhere there's a swamp appropriately constituted to preserve bodies, but most swamps I've ever heard of are primarily good at consumin' or de-stroyin' organic material. That Mummy and the Egyptian Princess are living a blessed eternal life, I tell ya'!