Tag Archives: universal pictures

Retrospective: The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942)

16 Sunday Aug 2020

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By 1942 Lionel Atwill had firmly established himself as a veteran of the silver screen and rightfully deserves top-billing in this horror / thriller from Universal Pictures.
He hits every note of the titular character in his stride with relative ease, both dialling up the mania and subtly downplaying the more reserved moments whilst still coming across as sinister in his mannerisms.
The narrative quickly shifts from science experiment gone awry when Atwill’s Dr. Benson inadvertently kills his subject when trying to resurrect the dead.
Think Flatliners but on a minimum scale.

Now a fugitive on the run, he goes in hiding on a ship to New Zealand. Unfortunately a police detective had also boarded the ship on a hunch that Benson is among its passengers.
This results in Benson resorting to drastic measures and pushing said detective overboard.
The drama doesn’t end there however, as somehow a fire erupts on the ship causing the passengers to abandon ship and our key players (including Benson) washing up on a remote island.
Once on the island the film starts to show its age, depicting the islanders as savages and easily manipulated by Benson’s medical knowledge when he resurrects one of the villagers from a supposed death (in reality, a stroke) with a potion (adrenaline). It’s a she because this depiction does jar when viewed with a modern lens and shifts the gaze away from the terror that is trying to be depicted.

It is then down to the survivors (all of whom are pretty formulaic) to try and outwit and expose Benson his true malicious  interests without putting their own lives on jeopardy.

The script does suffer from falling into predictable terrain and it could have amped up Benson’s maniacal moments to make his presence more terrifying, but hats off to director Joseph H Lewis for crafting together a fairly decent effort from a very low budget.
With a running time that’s just over the hour mark, The Mad Doctor of Market Street still amazed to entertain.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: The Wolf Man (1941)

08 Saturday Aug 2020

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The introduction of The Wolf Man would mark the last of the iconic stable monsters to come out of Universal studios during its golden age of horror. Along with it comes arguably one of the production houses’ most tragic characters in Larry Talbot. Talbot’s heartfelt sorrow is all the more pained due to his magnificent portrayal by Lon Chaney Jr, who after impressing in Man-Made Monster finally got to take on a lead-role as the doomed hero. 

In many ways the feature would serve as a signature to the passing of the torch from the old to the new with Chaney Jr ably supported by Claude Rains (The Invisible Man) as Larry’s father Sir John, and Bela Lugosi (Dracula) as Bela the Gypsy. The latter is all the more on the snout as Bela harbours the secret of being a lycanthrope and literally bites Talbot, transforming him and turning him into the monster. 

The strength of the cast doesn’t end there though, and this is part of the beauty of this film and why quite honestly, it still resonates today. With Ralph Bellamy (Rosemary’s Baby), Patric Knowles (Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man), Evelyn Ankers (The Ghost of Frankenstein), but none more striking than Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva, The Gypsy Fortune Teller.
Her role would lend significant weight and drama to Talbot’s plight and add a dash of the mysticism behind the mythology. She would reprise her role once more in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. 

Curt Siodmak would return once more as the screenwriter, in arguably his finest work, which is partly to do with him drawing from his own tragic history of segregation and oppressed Jew under the Nazi regime, a topic that doesn’t get lost in the narrative as Bela and Larry are both marked by the pentagram as part of their curse.

In this story, Talbot returns to his ancestral home to reunite with his estranged father.
Whilst there, he becomes infatuated with a local girl, Gwen, only to succumb to a wolf attack.
At first, Talbot believes that his plight is all too real, but when he heals so swiftly, he starts to question his own sanity, before the physical changes begin to occur.
From here, he withdraws from the world, not knowing who to turn to, afraid of what he might do.

Now that mythology is the stuff of legend, and many have transpired to go above and beyond where it all began with numerous tales of the shapeshifting beast.
The effects have come in leaps and bounds since this film, but a huge nod must go out to make up guru Jack Pierce who would produce the now infamous look from his own personal kit, including yak hair that was glued to Chaney Jr’s face in a laborious procedure.
The Wolf Man would go on to feature in a further four sequels, all featuring Chaney Jr (the only actor to play the role), which is part of its appeal, and one of the key characteristics of Talbot is his ‘nice guy’ personality that is conflicted with this plague. 

The film is iconic and despite being nearly 80 years old, is still solid.
A testament to the talent involved in its creation and Siodmak’s screenplay. As my journey through the Universal horror archive, this was a welcome shift in the positive direction.

  • Saul Muerte 

Retrospective: The Black Cat (1941)

01 Saturday Aug 2020

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The film derives its title from a classic Edgar Allan Poe short story, but its usage should be held lightly as it’s a far cry from its inspiration, only vaguely connected via said black cat who mysteriously arrives when a dead body is found.

Having traversed through the early Universal horror films and into the 1940s, it becomes apparent the strikingly familiar storyline that is at its helm, primarily based on The Old Dark House, which had been a winning formula for the giant film production house. 

The trouble is, this feels all too stale and tired in comparison to its predecessors that I felt beyond caring for the characters plight and you just long for Tim Curry to prop up and “camp” his way through a whodunnit spiel, just to spice things up a bit.

Instead we’re faced with a couple of bungling sleuths in the guise of antique dealers, there to praise the value of some of the elderly Henrietta Winslow’s estate. Henrietta is aware that she is to bequeath her fortune to a greedy family, so she writes up a will against their knowledge with a caveat stating that they will not be able to lay their hands on her money, until her housekeeper Abigail and her many cats have died.

Cue the death of Henrietta, the reveal of her will, and then a pursuit of Abigail from a mysterious assailant, leaving the two antique dealers to try and solve the murder before the night is through and to prevent a higher body count. 

The Black Cat boasts an incredible cast in Basil Rathbone, Hugh Herbert (who admittedly is slightly annoying with his comic relief), Broderick Crawford, Anne Gwynne, the brilliantly melodramatic Gale Sondegaard, a young Alan Ladd (“Shane!”) and a criminally underused Bela Lugosi as the ‘red herring’ character. So it’s a shame then that this is a massive misfire and never utilises the talent on display with essentially an incredibly poor script that tries to rest on intrigue and a narrative template.

It lacks substance and therefore the likes of Rathbone simply have nothing to play with on screen and the comedy moments just doesn’t connect, leaving the whole debacle feeling flat.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: Horror Island (1941)

23 Thursday Jul 2020

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Released as a double feature alongside Man-Made Monster, Horror Island would be billed as a mystery horror film but after viewing this 1940s film, it bears similarity to The Dark House, a decade its senior. 

The storyline loosely follows brash and down on his luck Bill (Dick Foran) who is always looking for his next scheme, in a role all too familiar to his portrayal of Steve Banning in The Mummy’s Hand. Like that film, Dick has an offsider to bounce off in the form of Fuzzy Knight playing the role of “Stuff”. Unfortunately Fuzzy doesn’t quite carry the same charisma as Wallace Ford. Instead, the banter comes more from Leo Carillo as the peg-legged sailor Tobias Clump. It’s a shame then that Clump becomes more secondary to the scene as the story develops into a whodunnit.

Clump serves as the instigator to Bill’s quest when he turns up with a treasure map leading to a small island, which Bill owns. When he is informed that the map isn’t genuine, Bill turns this into another plot to get money, by tauting a trip to his island to find the treasure, but claiming that it is haunted, so only the hardiest of people should go. From here a range of misfits are pitted together in search of a thrill or merely to be entertained, among them is love interest, Wendy (Peggy Moran – The Mummy’s Hand).

Once they arrive on the island however, things take a sinister turn as the guests start to be popped off one by one, ala Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with the prime suspect being a mysterious figure known as The Phantom lurking around behind the scenes.

Considering its 60 minute time, Horror Island  tries to cram a lot in, but in doing so continuously feels like it misses the mark by trying too much. So as such, the movie is neither scary, mysterious, nor comical. Instead it is mediocre, especially compared to some of the other films released around the same time.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: Man-Made Monster (1941)

17 Friday Jul 2020

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjPJ4px-S3E

Historically speaking, Man-Made Monster marks a significant point in horror film history as it marked the Prince of Pain, Lon Chaney Jr’s first lead role in the genre.

Here Chaney Jr plays the happy-go-lucky Dan McCormick, a man with a curious immunity to an overdose of electricity that propels him to life on the road with a travelling circus.
The story picks up however when McCormick is the sole survivor of a tragic bus accident that collides into a power-line.
Think David Dunn from the Unbreakable series, but less dramatic and moody.

His survival comes to the attention of Dr. John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds – It’s A Wonderful Life), who just so happens to be studying the effects of electricity. 

The horror element comes in when Lawrence’s assistant, Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill – Doctor X) takes the experiment into his own hands to manipulate an unwitting McCormick to undergo a series of tests with massive side effects.
McCormick soon shows signs of fatigue and irritability as a result of the tests and the transformation turns him into a super-charged monster (a walking atomic light bulb) with the ability to kill with a single touch.
This is exactly what occurs when Dr Lawrence finds out and attempts to shed light on Rigas’ illegal scientific experiments.
That won’t hold water and Rigas ensures that McCormick (who is now under the mad scientists’ rule) stops Lawrence at all costs.

Despite a fairly low box office return and that it bared all too similarity to the Lugosi/Karloff feature, The Invisible Ray (a reason that the film had been shelved for a few years), it is a fairly stable movie and boasts great performances from both Atwill and Chaney Jr.
For Chaney Jr. it would propel him into stardom and into a career that he could never shake, especially with The Wolf Man just around the corner, but there’s good reason as he’s definitely a captivating presence on screen.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: Black Friday (1940)

02 Thursday Jul 2020

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ3T9rniDic

Not to be confused with the crazed shopping spree that occurs after Thanksgiving, but arguably just as dark.
Universal would blend together two of their most successful genres from the era in horror and gangster thrillers to produce a solid movie which would once again combine the awesome pairing of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
The latter possibly delivers one of his finest performances for the production company as Dr. Ernest Sovac, a highly skilled surgeon who is compelled to save the life of his best friend college professor George Kinglsey (Stanley Ridges) with a brain transplant.
Being a Universal horror feature, things naturally don’t go according to plan when a curious side effect occurs post operation. 

The chosen brain just so happens to be from Red Cannon (also played by Ridges who should be commended for his portrayal of both characters) a gangster who is not only highly sought after by the police, but has hidden $500,000 dollars somewhere in the city. 

The curious concomitant occurs when somehow Kingsley starts to show personality traits of Cannon in an almost Jekyll and Hyde type situation. Cannon clearly the dominant personality starts to take firm control of Kinsley’s body in pursuit of his hidden fortune.

The drama from the movie comes from Lugosi’s Marnay, another gangster who was part of Cannon’s crew and knows of the loot and will stop at anything to stake his claim, but also from Dr. Kovac, who at first is driven by saving his friend, but when he too learns of the fortune, gets the green mist and becomes consumed with using Kingsley as a puppet to lead him to the money. 

It’s a pathway for doom and death for all involved and sparks an inevitable conclusion from a tale of greed, and power.

It’s a curious movie that is only really saved by Karloff’s performance from a script doctored by Curt Siodmak again, but comes across as a bit of a mish-mash of events leaving Lugosi grossly underutilised.
With some clever changes to the plotline and perhaps a shift in casting, this movie could have presented more fairly, but as it stands, gets a little lost in its own moralistic views. 

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: The Invisible Woman (1940)

10 Wednesday Jun 2020

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPqzcLgjs0

In 1940 Universal Pictures bookended the calendar year starting with The Invisible Man Returns and then ending with The Invisible Woman.
While the former took on the tone of a crime thriller, the latter took the series in an entirely different direction, comedy.
This would also be an indication of Universal Classic Monsters future, leaning away from the macabre and into humour.

With The Invisible Woman it is indicative of its time when it comes to the bawdy comedy at hand with a little bit of screwball rom com in the mix ala Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, also released in the same year.
Here the two leads that are at odds with one another are wealthy lawyer Richard Russell (John Howard) and Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), a feisty, smart and determined department store model.
When we meet Kitty, she gets fired from her job for basically speaking her mind and with the promise of money learns of a wild scheme by local scientist, Professor Gibbs (an ageing and always excellent, John Barrymore) who claims that he has invented an invisibility device.
Gibbs in need of a guinea pig gets one in Kitty, who is surprised to see that the mad professor’s invention actually works and what’s more, she can turn it to her advantage and seek revenge on her misogynistic former boss. 

Before long, we’re headlong into a crime caper with a mob boss, Blackie Cole (Oscar Homolka) seeking to use the invisibility device for his own gain. Kitty must use her guile and new-found abilities to stop Cole in his devious plans. 

The Prognosis:

The Invisible Woman is definitely a film for its time and even though some of its subject still resonates today, the style and mode of its delivery may be stifling for some.
I for one welcome this old-school, nostalgic road trip that the 40s delivered to the silver screen enjoying it all the way and for a third instalment, I personally connected with this one more than The Invisible Man Returns.
It would be interesting to see how it would have been handled as a dark comedy. At the time of writing, Elizabeth Banks is set to direct a new version of The Invisible Woman and being a veteran of the comedy and horror scene, it will be interesting to see if she plans to marry these two genres for a modern audience and continue the trend set by Whannell… and it does bode the question, Will we see the return of Elizabeth Moss as Cecilia Kass?

  • Saul Muerte

Movie review: Happy Death Day 2U

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

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Here at the Surgeons School of Horror there are some key elements that make up a good sequel.

  1. It stays faithful to what was set up in (the spirit of) the original.
  2. It offers something new that adds to the original. It needs to feel right and makes you say, “Yeah, that fits!” without contradicting it.
  3. And the tipping point in shifting from a great sequel into an awesome one is that it must stand on its own as an individual film.

Highlander 2 for example completely ignored the rules as to why they were immortal in Highlander 1 = Bad movie.

Escape From LA is a literal rehash of Escape From New York = Bad movie.

Where as Aliens explored and expanded the mythology of the xenomorph whilst making a film that stands alone, which is fantastic and feels like it sits comfortably within the universe that Ridley Scott set up = Great movie.

So, where does Happy Death 2U fit into this equation?
Well, lets take a quick snapshot of our original review from its predecessor:

Murdered on her birthday, college student wakes up to find that she is stuck in a time loop in true Groundhog Day style and must relive the day all over again and can only break out of this vortex by finding her murderer.

It was a cool premise with some black comedy thrown in to boot to keep the viewer connected. Sure it had its flaws, particularly with continuity left, right, and centre. At the time I found it hard to connect with and treated it as a fairly middle of the road movie but it resonated with the younger generation who understood the humour and the college satire that was injected into the lead protagonist, Tree’s plight.

So with a successful first outing, Director Christopher Landon and producer Jason Blum felt that there was enough material there to warrant a second trip into the time loop with a sequel.

So going back to our rules for what makes a successful sequel how does it fair.

  1. Does it stay faithful to the original?
    Yes and no.
    Yes, because it does keep up with the rules applied with Tree finding herself, trapped in a time loop again and it amps up the comedy element this time around more successfully I felt.
    No, because it loses the horror element and steps firmly into sci-fi territory which may lose some of the original fans… but having said that and to use our Alien / Aliens analogy again, the original movie was a sci-fi horror, where as the sequel was more of a sci-fi action movie, so there’s no reason that you can’t shift genre and still make it successful.
  2. Does it add anything to the original that feels right?
    Hell yes! And this is HDD2U’s trump card. Where fans of the original maybe disappointed with the shift in genre, the writers stay within the boundaries of believability by throwing in the McGuffin of Carter’s roommate Ryan, who has invented a reactor that sucks Tree into said time loop with the added parallel universe jump to he mix.
    Tree still has to hunt down a killer, but this time around is faced with a few complex life choices.
  3. So, does it stand on its own as a stand-alone movie? Not really, as it heavily relies on the original to tie things together.

The Diagnosis:

The name of the game is fun in this movie. Whilst it steers away from the horror element, there is enough humour and drama in the mix to make this an incredibly entertaining feature that not only supports the original, but may even surpass it in some people’s eyes.
Oh and stick around for a mid credits scene that potentially opens up the universe even further.

– Antony Yee and Saul Muerte

Movie Review: Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

20 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Universal Horror

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The first sequel to the Universal Dracula franchise would be released just five years after its predecessor.

In the last outing we saw the demise of the titular character at the hands of Professor Van Helsing, (played once again by Edward Van Sloan, and the only returning character to the franchise) who interestingly enough is on trial for the murder of the Count.

That in itself is something I’ve often pondered about. In a world where vampires and werewolves are the stuff of legend, if they were to exist, how would one prove it after they’ve been through such an ordeal and essentially disposed of the evidence?
Anyway, I digress.

Dracula’s Daughter is not only a sequel, but the start of a trend for Universal in order to keep their booming business going when your lead villain has been dispatched – by introducing an offspring.

We would see this repeated again with the likes of Son of Dracula and Son of Frankenstein.
In this instance the Dracula bloodline flows down to his daughter, Countess Marya Zaleska, with a suitably melodramatic performance from Gloria Holden (The Life of Emile Zola).

Her portrayal of the female vampire with a craving to be human (an act that she hopes will come true with the destruction of her father’s body) served as an inspiration to Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned.

The notion of a vampire’s desire to be human has often been looked at in films and novels throughout the years, but as far as I know, this is the first instance of it on the silver screen.

When Countess Zaleska burns the body of Dracula, with the help of her manservant, Sandor, she discovers that the curse has not been broken, so resorts to an alternate method of psychiatry instead.

In steps Dr. Garth (Otto Kruger, Saboteur) who may just have the answer she needs. Garth entices her to confront her demons head on, but her desire for blood proves too strong and she attacks a girl named Lili.

Broken and lost, the Countess feels her only option is to remain a vampire, but decides that Dr. Garth would prove a suitable companion in the after life.

So she resorts to kidnapping his true love, Janet (Marguerite Churchill, The Big Trail) and luring him back with her to Transylvania.

Dr Garth is willing to give up his life for the sake of Janet’s freedom, and all seems doomed for the Doctor, when the manservant Sandor puts a halt on the proceedings and kills the Countess in a jealous rage with an arrow through her heart.

Before he is able to exact his fury further, he too is brought down, when he is shot by a policeman.

~

Critics have been somewhat split in their reviews of Dracula’s Daughter, some citing its lush cinematography and praising both Director Lambert Hillyer’s work and the performance from Holden. Others say that it pails in comparison to Dracula.

I for one, found it strangely mesmerising and almost hypnotic with some of its lesbian overtones and this is in part down to Holden’s captivating presence on screen.

And like other critics, I too noticed a similarity to Sunset Boulevard in its themes, a film that I’m a great lover of and perhaps why I find myself drawn to this movie, despite it not carrying the same weight as Dracula.

I applaud its effort to push the story into a whole new direction and to offer some alternative narrative to the tried and tested monster storyline.

For this alone, I believe that Dracula’s Daughter its place alongside the movies that made Universal pictures a force to be reckoned with, and its perhaps a shame that it has been lost in the shadows of time due to the overwhelming impact that both Dracula and Frankenstein had on the industry.

– Paul Farrell
Lead Surgeon