5. April 2008 by Ria.

So we’re in the first week of April, and I’m just getting around to the last Lugosi movie on this DVD, so you know what that means, right? I’ll extend Lugosi month throughout April, so also be on the lookout for White Zombie, Black Friday, and The Invisible Ray later on this month. First of all, I want to say that I have issues with Lugosi taking second billing to Karloff when obviously Lugosi had the bigger part. I will admit that Karloff is a slightly better actor, but that was only because he was offered better parts than Lugosi.

I mean, what did Karloff do in this movie, except walk around, looking like an hideous mope, playing a servant that can barely talk? And speaking of looks, I need to tell you folks, that if you’re eating while watching this movie, hurry up and finish it, because you might lose your appetite after you see what Karloff looks like after Lugosi does a number on his face. Now let’s get started……….The movie starts out with this dumb chick Jean (Irene Ware) speeding in the rain, and runs of the road. Now the car flipped over a few times, and she ends up in the hospital near death.

“Now, Universal, I see I’m gonna have to give you guys a lesson in realism here. Anyone that’s a victim of a horrifying car accident, is gonna look jacked up, so its alright to put a few cuts and bruises on her face, especially if you don’t want to go the whole 9 yards and bandage up her whole head. Now after she has surgery, she can go back to looking perfect, like before the accident. Are you guys taking notes?” Okay, so Jean is slipping away into permanent la-la land, when her father Judge Thatcher (Samuel Hinds) contacts Dr. Richard Vollin (Lugosi), the only one he thinks can save her life.

Now the first couple of times, Vollin pretty much tells him to kiss off, so the judge takes a ride out to his house and pleads with him to save his daughter’s life. After all that beggin’, Vollin agrees, and in no time at all Jean is back to normal. Vollin falls in love with her, but she’s engaged to Jerry (Lester Matthews), but still invites him to see her dance at some show. “Oh yeah, and that’s another thing Universal, couldn’t you find a real dancer to stick in there, because  let me tell you, Jean can’t dance. What was that? You mean, that was a real dancer? Uh, ok, if you say so………….”

Now Jean kind of likes Vollin too, and her father sees all this and doesn’t like it. So he takes a trip out to Vollin’s place to ask him not to encourage any kind of flirting from Jean, and in his own roundabout way suggests that he find someone else to hit on. He tells Vollin that he really doesn’t want a young girl like Jean. “Judge Thatcher, are you stupid or something? Don’t you know that men fossils would give anything to get a young girl to pay them any attention, so what are you talking about?”

Vollin gets pissed off, and I guess this is the time he goes crazy, and starts thinking of ways to kill to him. Now on-the-run criminal Bateman (Karloff) stops by Vollin’s house in order to get a face lift, 1st, so that he won’t be found out by the cops after he killed a couple of people, and 2nd, ’cause he knew that people had nightmares after seeing his big ugly face in the Black Cat movie, so he decided to do something about it. Now Vollin told him that he wasn’t a plastic surgeon, and Bateman got what was coming to him, a jacked up face.

Vollin also disfigured him (more than he already was), because he was trying to blackmail Bateman into killing off the Thatchers, after all, Bateman just killed a couple of people, what wrong with adding 3 more to the notch on the belt? The deal? Vollin will fix Bateman’s face, if he does the killings. So Vollin makes him a butler, and invites the Thatchers, Jerry, and some more of his dull friends over for a party. Now Vollin is a huge Edgar Allen Poe fan, and he talks about how the talking raven in the poem supposedly went mad, after he lost his love.

Now this torture chamber that Vollin created is a symbol of the Raven’s madness (and his own) that we get to see towards the end of the movie. Bateman kidnaps the Judge, and straps him down on this slab where there’s a razor like pendulum swinging back and forth. Then, Vollin throws Jean, and Jerry in this room where the walls move in to crush whatever is in there. Good, I hope they get it, I’m tired of those two anyway. Well, they would have gotten it, if Bateman didn’t decide to play hero at the last minute.

He realized that he had the hots for Jean, and decides to rescue her and her father from doom. “Bateman, you’re stupid for saving her, forget about running off with her, she’s engaged to someone else, nor does she want some fugitive who looks like he was just hit in the face with a garbage pizza.” Now why Bateman is trying to save the Judge, Vollin gets pissed off, and shoots him, but he still has enough strength to save Jean, and push Vollin into that room that closes in on you, so he’s history. But so is Bateman who dies shortly after.

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31. March 2008 by Ria.

Okay, we have the two biggest classic movie horror legends going at it in this movie, providing you with much entertainment. While Karloff is awesome as satanic cult leader Poelzig, I had to take off a star for the horrible music that was played all throughout the movie. In some scenes, I had to turn the volume down on the TV so that I wouldn’t have to keep hearing that mess over and over again.

Anyway, we start this movie with another lame couple, Peter and Joan Alison, acting oh, so loving towards each other. Yes, they’re newlyweds, how did you guess? They’re on a train heading somewhere in Hungary, when they meet Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), a psychiatrist who ends up sharing the compartment with them. He tells the Alisons that he left his wife 18 years ago to go to war, and now he’s going to visit an old friend.

Well, they all get off at the same stop, and ride with a guy who’s not paying attention to what he’s doing, and they run off the road in a bad storm. Too bad you couldn’t sue people back then. Anyway, fragile Joan is hurt, so everyone flock to the home of Poelzig (Karloff) who meets everyone looking evil as hell. Vitus tells him that the years have been kind to him. “Vitus, you must need glasses or something, because Poelzig looks like lightning struck him in the face, not once, but twice, so why are you lying to that man?”

I don’t know why Vitus is being so cordial with Poelzig, because he’s pretty pissed at him about now. When Vitus went to war, Poelzig left him and 10,000 other soldiers to die, while he ran off with Vitus’s wife. Vitus was taken prisoner for 15 years, and now he’s out for blood, so he tells Poelzig in so many words, to watch his step, and demands to know where his wife and daughter are. At this time, Peter comes in after attending to his wife who is now resting. So now the conversation, and mood in the room changes, as Peter introduces himself to Poelzig.

So now the three of them are having a lively chat with a couple of drinks, when a black cat strolls by, Vitus freaks out, and throws a knife at it, killing it. “Now Vitus, I know you are the hero in this movie, and you have an intense phobia of cats, but what makes you think you can come into someone’s house, and start killing off their pets, just because you have issues?”

Vitus says that the black cat is the living embodiment of evil, “Okay, so what’s going on Vitus? Do you have a fear of cats, or is it just black cats? Well, it doesn’t matter, you shouldn’t have killed the damn cat.” Poelzig assures us that the cat is not dead, he states that the black cat, like evil, never dies. “Well, how nice, now can one of you guys pour me a drink because I’m lovin’ all this action.” Now Peter’s wife Joan comes in the room, and starts talking dumb stuff, and Peter carries her back to the room to rest.

Vitus goes on and on about his wife and child, so Poelzig decides to take him to the basement of his home, and shows Vitus his wife’s body, stuffed and mounted. Poelzig also tells him that his daughter is dead, but Vitus isn’t buying none of this stuff, and pulls out a gun. However, the deathless black cat walks by, and once again Vitus freaks out, and ends up disoriented. Poelzig decides to take Vitus up on his game of death, but only after the Alisons are gone. “That’s crap Vitus. Don’t go for that, kill him now, and save yourself the pain and heartache that’s about to come later on.”

Well, everyone goes to bed now, including Poelzig, wait a minute, who’s that pretty young lady on the other side of the bed? It’s Karen, Vitus’s daughter. “Look Karen, please tell me you two just sleep next to each other and nothing else, right? At least tell me that if you two carry on like lovebirds, that you do it in the dark? This way, you can fantasize about men that you really want to be with, like Errol Flynn, Clark Gabel, Groucho Marx. What? Ok, so Groucho is not the best looking guy in town, but he’s better than what you have now!”

Anyway, Poelzig decides to use Joan as a sacrifice during his cult ceremony, so he’s not going to let them leave in the morning. Vitus plays chess with Poelzig so that if he wins, the Alison’s can leave, but he loses. The Alison’s try to leave anyway, but Peter get’s knocked out, and dumb Joan faints. Actually she faints not once, but twice in this movie, and I’ve had it with her, so I’m taking off another star!

Now, we’re gonna skip a whole bunch of stuff, and get to the part where Joan runs into Karen. Joan tells her that vitus is alive and well inside the house, and that’s he’s come for her. Now all the while, Poelzig is eavesdropping, and when they both go back to the bedroom, he kills her. “Wait a minute Poelzig, I remember you saying a few scenes back that she was the very core of your being, so why did you off her?” Vitus finds out about this, and its on now. Vitus skins him alive, but takes a bullet from Peter, who mistakenly thought Vitus was in cahoots with Poelzig.

The Alisons escape, and Vitus finds that famous kill-everybody-in-the-house switch which blows up the whole castle, and that’s it. Okay people, two down, and one more to go on this DVD!

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29. March 2008 by Ria.

Okay, listen up all classic movie freaks, I want you to know this is Bela Lugosi month, yes, I know the month is almost over, so I have a lot of work to do, right? I will also be watching the Black Cat, and the Raven. Why all this Lugosi you ask? Well, all three movies came on one DVD rental, so I might as well review them all, right? Oh, I’ll try to throw in some Bogart, and another Hitchcock classic for the first week in April, so be on the lookout for those, now let’s get started.

First of all, thumbs down to Universal Pictures for using the same opening music theme for Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue, you cheapos! Anyway, the movie’s setting is Paris,1845, and there’s some kind of fair, or carnival going on. Here we meet the lamest couple in town, Camille (Sidney Fox), and Pierre (Leon Ames), and some of their friends who decide to take a peek at the sideshow that Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) has going on.

Now, Dr. Mirakle introduces everyone to Erik, an ape hanging out behind bars. Then he starts lecturing about the evolution of man, and how he can prove kinship between ape and man by mixing the blood of a gorilla, and a human. “Well Dr. Mirakle, this is all well and good, but those people didn’t come to your show to hear you spout off crap that they can learn from a Paleontology class, so unless the ape can shoot craps, do back flips, play Monopoly, or download stuff off YouTube, no one is interested, so pack up your stuff, and get the hell out of town!”

At the end of Dr. Mirakle’s lecture, Pierre, and Camille go up to meet Erik. Now at this point, the ape is kind and gentle, and extends a hand to Camille, a gesture in order to get her bonnet. So Camille takes off her bonnet, and gives it to him. Dr. Mirakle comes along and states that Erik has an eye for beauty.

I’m sure he’s talking about the bonnet, and not Camille, ’cause she’s really not all that, but I guess it doesn’t matter what I think, because Dr. Mirakle tries to get her address in order to send her a new bonnet. Well, that’s what he told her, but we all know the real reason is so that he can kidnap her, to try to mix her blood with Erik’s blood, so that he can create the perfect specimen.

Pierre steps in and tells Dr. Mirakle in so many words, that there’s no need to send his girl a bonnet, and no reason to know where she lives, but Dr. Mirakle being the sneak that he is, follows Camille home. Now we have this lovey dovey scene going on where Pierre is saying crap to Camille like, how she’s pure and beautiful like a flower, and how she looks like a white morning star, with hair full of stardust. “That’s right, get all that mushy stuff out of the way now, ’cause in 10 years, you two won’t be able to look at each another without throwing up.”

Next scene, Dr. Mirakle is on his way home, when he witnesses two men fighting over a woman. The woman is crying her eyes out, while the two men kill each other. Dr. Mirakle invites the lady back to his place, where he ties her up, injects her with Erik’s blood, and she also dies. Next scene, Pierre, who’s a medical student, goes to the morgue to ask if he can view the new corpses that just came in, and maybe perform some kind of an autopsy.

The keeper of the morgue (D’Arcy Corrigan) agrees to deliver one of the corpses to him, for a fee. Next scene, Pierre is studying at home with his roommate Paul (Bert Roach) who’s slaving away over a hot stove making…………….macaroni and cheese? “So Paul, you’re wearing an apron just so you can make macaroni? Wait, what’s that stuff you’re putting on top of it?

Pierre, I wouldn’t eat that mess if I was you, it looks like your roommate just put some kind of a spaghetti sauce on top of that macaroni, so just give him some excuse like you’re too busy to eat now, so that you can spare yourself the misery of eating that garbage.”

Now lets skip a whole bunch of scenes, and go to this picnic that Camille and her friends are having. Camille tells Pierre, that she received a bonnet from Dr. Mirakle, along with a note for her to come visit him later on that night. Pierre is suspicious, and decides he’ll go in her place. That night Pierre once again meets Dr. Mirakle, and starts asking questions, now they’re both suspicious.

Dr. Mirakle realizes that if he’s gonna capture Camille, he’d better do it that night, so after Pierre leaves, he goes to her house and tries to persuade her to come with him, but she declines, and slams the door in his face. So now, Dr. Mirakle sends Erik after her, and everything after this point belongs in a King Kong movie. Camille sees ape, freaks out, then faints. “Camille, you are such a fool! Your life is on the line, and the best you can do is faint? You’re lucky that I can’t jump into that TV screen and smack you silly!”

Now Erik is on a rampage, he kills Camille’s mom, and shoves her up a fireplace, then he kills Dr. Mirakle, and flees to the top of the building with Camille. “Okay, Eric, now that you’ve made it to the top of the building, THROW HER OFF! But we all know that doesn’t happen, Pierre comes after her, saves her, and kills Erik, and that’s the end.

Click on link to get a glimpse of the trailer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I8T-xTR0hQ

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