Classic Universal Horror - Page 2

It's possible, it just seemed out of place with the general tone. I haven't seen Bride yet.

An underrated classic! Great sets, mood to spare. Definitely the best of the Karloff/Lugosi films I've seen. Ulmer's underappreciated.

I think it's just a weird cut that might feel like comedy now, but honestly probably scared the living shit out of people in 1931. FX makeup wasn't that common (aside from Chaney), and that face wasn't something anyone was used to seeing. The first film treats that visage like the most special thing ever; Bride is "taking the piss" here and there.

Yeah, The Black Cat is a nice fucked up pre-Hays Code little flick. It might be Karloff at his creepiest.

I always wondered why Lugosi never returned as Dracula until Abbott and Costello. His career was pretty much in the toilet by the '40s, and it seems he could have used the work in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. It's a shame because Carradine might be best shittiest Dracula ever.

Aw, give the guy a break. He was probably blitzed out of his mind the entire time!

Carradine actually is closer to the way Dracula is described in Stoker's novel, at least in appearance.

I really like SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. It features some really cool sets, and it has my favorite Lugosi performance. Although the villagers naming the village Frankenstein just seems like asking for trouble, and why the Basil Rathbone's kid speaks in a southern accent I will never know.

And Karloff wears the cool furry vest.
Son is the last legitimately good Frankenstein film. After that you start entering the "you need to be a fan" area to enjoy them.

Son is also the longest Universal monster movie at 99 minutes. That's like Lawrence of Arabia for those movies.

And it's all original footage, which is also something of a novelty for these sequels.

The universal films use stock footage, heavily?

I think he means footage from the previous films.

Except for Frankenstein Meets Churchill.

hahahaha

Anyone see that little short 'Boo' on the Frankenstein DVD. It's funnier than it has any right to be, made me chuckle quite abit.

Just ducking in here to back up Dracula's Daughter and The Black Cat. And The Old Dark House doesn't get nearly enough love these days.

Also, a viewing of Son of Frankenstein is essential to appreciating most of the in-jokes in Young Frankenstein.

Let's talk logos. For some reason, I've always found Universal's little rumbling airplane to set a perfect, ominous tone.

Agree. And the old-time showmanship of "It's A Universal Picture" and "A GOOD CAST IS WORTH REPEATING."

And I love the stills so hi-res you can see the wig lines and such (your browser will scale it down; click on it).

Watching Lugosi's performance in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman really shows that we dodged a bullet in 1931 when he refused the part of the monster. I had forgotten how awful he was in that role. Although to be fair to Lugosi, I'm sure Karloff would not have deserved to smell his shit as Dracula.

Karloff would have been an amazing Dracula. Watch The Black Cat or The Mummy. And I'm not saying "better" or "as good as"; it would have been a totally different thing. But it would have been (under someone other than Tod Browning's direction) amazing.

I watched Dracula and thought it was good, Bela Lugosi was occasionally hammy but overall he gave the definitive performance which has since been embedded into pop culture. Some of the scenes were very atmospheric, especially in the castle. Dwight Frye was the real standout here, he delivers a great performance as the creepy Renfield.

I think Nosferatu is a superior telling of Bram Stoker's novel but Dracula is still worth watching, I really want to watch the spanish version.

I just saw Bride for the first time, and I'm curious (and spoilery) -- when the Monster meets Praetorius in the crypt, and he says "I love dead, hate living," were we meant to take that, at the time, as him saying he enjoyed the peace of the crypt compared to constantly being harassed by the villagers? After the climax it felt like some crafty foreshadowing (or at least, crafty for a Universal monster movie).

And I wonder if the Bride was popularly considered as sexy back then as she is now. What constitutes horror in these films suggests a pretty puritanical audience, so finding a zombie woman hot must have been conflicting.

First question, yeah, pretty much, I think. Can you blame him?

Second question, I sorta doubt it; audiences demanded hideousness from their horror, after all, and I can't really think of a celebrity known as attractive who resembles her until maybe the Punk era?

Bride spoilers again --

I guess to clarify my interpretation of the Monster's dialogue in the crypt is that I took it to be a simple observation that he prefers dead people to living people ("I hate living [people]"), rather than the self-aware existential angst it seems to have been in retrospect. Just in case my meaning didn't come across before.

That seems like a pretty good criterion.

Oh, ok. I guess that makes even more sense, actually.

Wow, the Universal Horror DVDs look like absolute garbage on an HD set. Blu Rays next Halloween, maybe?

It sounded like he was simply saying he loved the dead because they don't fuck with him all the time.
But that line carries extra thematic weight when you consider it's delivered shortly after he learns that he's made from corpses. The line ties in to his need to find a place to belong. And yeah, there's gay subtext as well.

I've decided this film is so much better with the Philip Glass Kronos Quartet score.

Revisited the HOUSE OF... films this year and they're worse than ever. For some reason I never realized just how fundamentally lame they are. In both movies the three big monsters barely have any screentime and they are promptly killed before they have a chance to do anything.
HOUSE OF DRACULA has the worst instance of this. The Frankenstein monster doesn't get off the table until the final two minutes. He takes a few steps, somebody yells "It's the monster!" then the lab blows up all around him (and those shots are recycled footage from GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN). The end.

SON OF has a nice offbeat script. But Lon Chaney as Dracula is probably the worst casting of all of them. Worse even than Lugosi as the Frankenstein Monster.

As for the first Dracula, it is often said that Lugosi and Frye save the entire movie. It's so odd that Tod Browning's most successful film would be his stiffest. FREAKS and MARK OF THE VAMPIRE have so much more visual style.
Check out the Spanish language version of Dracula shot at night on the same sets. With an inferior Dracula and superior direction, it's like a bizarro version.

She's clearly intended to be beautiful in an unexpected way, what with the glam makeup and the Nefertiti hairdo. The whole joke when the bandages come off is that she isn't a horrible mess of scar tissue like Monster 1.0.

The commentary (and the awesome book Hollywood Gothic) get into this a bit. Uncle Todd liked to drink! Some people say Browning was barely on set. One actress claims Karl Freund directed all her scenes (which is odd because he directed the shit out of The Mummy 2 years later).

In my autumn years, I've really come to appreciate the monster also-rans like Werewolf of London and Dracula's Daughter.

Freund help design the three camera system pioneered on I Love Lucy, didn't he? So maybe he was experimenting with that? Or perhaps somebody (Browning, I'm looking at you) decided that shooting it to resemble the popular stage adaptation would be a smart stylistic choice.
Whatever the reason, we'll never really know the sceret of the armadillos.

BTW- Halloween night we projected BRIDE on a sheet in our driveway. All the neighborhood kids under ten enjoyed it. Take that, Sommers!

Didn't it rain all night? We projected 42nd Street Forever. I don't like my neighbors.

Canopy tent.
That heavy 5 minute downpour came when they were creating the bride in the storm. It was awesome in the truest sense of the word.

42nd Street? No wonder you need a gun to protect yourself.

I used to feel the same way until I found out the cuts that the film suffered. At the end of the previous entry in the Frankenstein series, Ghost of Frankenstein, the brain of Ygor (Bela Lugosi) was placed into the body of the Monster..............leaving us with a pretty intelligent evil Monster with full speech capabilities. It was also revealed that the transplant didn't fully work and Ygor Monster was left mostly blind. They cast Lugosi as the Monster in the next film because in the script (and the cut scenes that were filmed), the Monster spoke. It made more sense to use Bela than to just dub his voice over Lon Chaney's as the Monster (although they briefly considered Chaney doing dual roles as both the Monster and Talbot). So when watching it now you have to account for the fact that Bela's dialogue scenes have been completely excised and the reason he stumbles around so clumsily is because he is blind! So instead of having the monster speak as the sinister Ygor, we are only left with scenes of Bela stumbling around and occasionally growling.

I know that the "making of" book about the film that was available years ago had the dialogue scenes still intact in the script section. I am pretty sure they were filmed, but not 100% sure. Anyway, if they were I doubt that the footage was even saved.......let alone left in a state where it could be restored to the film itself.

You can still see his mouth moving in certain scenes, but his audio was removed. Poor Bela was in a lot of pain from the monster boots. And he was a lot older. And he was hopped up on goofballs. Supposedly they cut his dialogue because his speech was so unintellegible.
Really, the only other actor to effectively play the monster was stuntman Glenn Strange.

I still would also like a reason for Carradine playing Dracula instead of Lugosi. I have never really been able to find one. Especially since they ended up using Bela anyway in the Abbott & Costello film. I guess it is high time for me to pick up one of the many tomes on Universal's classic horror films. Been tempted to on many occasion before.

It's a shame it wasn't included as a double disc set, I wouldn't have minded seeing it.

I'd never made the Nefertiti connection! The look just became so iconic in its own right. And I totally missed the impact of the reveal as you describe it. I've never thought of Bride imagery saturating the culture the way the other monsters have, but I couldn't see it with an objective eye, even seeing the film for the first time.

This is my current desktop image. My 5 year old daughter says "Frankenstein and the Wolfman are doing karaTAY!" My kid's awesome.

In McFarland Press' Universal Horrors, all that's said on the subject is that "Lugosi was considered for the role, but it is said he had to bow out on account of other commitments." David Skal's Hollywood Gothic hints at a different reason (but seems oblivious to/uninterested in hitting it head on) - "Lugosi changed agents frequently, and would frustrate them with periodic refusals to play Dracula at any price." It's noteworthy that Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein is his last speaking role for a major studio.

Are you referring to the Spanish language version? It's been on every DVD of the Lugosi Dracula.

Some more digging. From Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, by Greg Mank:

The book also cites Universal squeezing in the film to fit the back half of a 12 week contract they had with Karloff, rendering them unwilling or unable to wait for Lugosi, as well as evidence that they'd been building up Carradine as their new horror star the year before. But elsewhere in the book, Mank offers another motive as to why Universal wasn't hot on Lugosi:

He practically had to beg for his part in A&C.

I love how Lugosi kept returning in different roles - as the Count, as the Monster, as Ygor, as a gypsy. He was the Cheech Marin of the series.

Whoah, we almost got a Technicolor Universal Monster flick.

The Old Dark House is one of the funniest horror movies I've ever seen, up there with Dead Alive and Shaun of the Dead. There's something utterly sublime about Ernest Thesiger's performance. "Have another potato".