David Vining's Blog, page 111

The Universal Classic Monsters: The Definitive Ranking

The Universal Monster boxset that covers the highlights (and some of the lowlights) from Universals horror output from 1931 through 1956 was indeed a quality addition to the collection. I didn’t love everything, and I disliked its fair share, but there were enough nice, little surprises along the way that I feel confident in keeping the entire boxset on my shelf.

My favorite concept was in The Invisible Man. It had the most narrative malleability to tell different kinds of stories, but th...

The Creature Walks Among Us

Whose bright idea was it to change the design of the Gill Man to *checks notes* remove the gills? Seriously, I can understand the half-baked ideas about science taking shortcuts around Nature, the uninteresting love triangle thing that barely exists, or even the meandering story. All of that is pretty standard B-movie effort, but the Gill Man costume was one of the best things about this entire franchise, and they shaved him down to just a big, hulking man-thing with big lips. That’s just wr...

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy

How weird is it that Abbott and Costello star in not only the best monster team up movie of the classic era but also the best Mummy movie of the 30s, 40s, and 50s? It’s weird, but it’s true. Their effort with the Invisible Man was a bit of a dud, but they come back in the same zany form as their first movie in the Universal Monster franchise, finding a way to inject their brand of comedy into a Mummy story with a light touch including a couple of standout moments that highlight the more fami...

Revenge of the Creature

The first Creature from the Black Lagoon was something of a hodgepodge of quality with a central monster that seemed accidentally sympathetic. I wasn’t expecting that kind of happy accident in the sequel. What I got was a more standard monster movie with more boring characters, more implausible coincidences, and a title that doesn’t really match the story. I mean, it’s somewhat competent at what it does, but what it does just isn’t that interesting.

We get what amounts to a prologue invol...

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Finally, a new monster. The Universal Monster franchise had gotten to the point where the serious thrills of the early films had been replaced by outright and intentional comedy. There was room in the market for more straight horror, but the Frankenstein monster just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Something new needed to come along. So, they came up with a fish man and made a cross between King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Sure, okay.

An archaeologist, Dr. Maia (Antonio Moreno), finds the c...

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man

Building off of the surprise financial success of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein as well as the comedic stinger at the end of it, Universal took a script for a straight sequel in the Invisible Man series and inserted the Abbott and Costello personalities into it. The combination is an uncomfortable one where the movie never embraces the madcap energy of the first entry and it also ends up feeling like its embracing the conventions of the horror series too seriously on a character leve...

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

The Universal Monster franchise was dead. Long live the Universal Monster franchise!

After having worn the core three creatures as thin as possible through a series of decreasingly interesting matchup movies that seemed to try to take the monsters seriously while just covering the same ground over and over again, Universal decided that the only way forward was to make them outright comedies. Recruiting the comedian act of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, along with their frequent collaborator...

She-Wolf of London

It’s hard to talk about this movie without completely spoiling its twist because all of its faults center around that twist. It’s not the twist itself that is the problem, it’s that in order for the dramatic impact of the twist to be felt it can’t be a twist. It also doesn’t help that it’s really predictable. That drains the film of any tension (combined with the fact that the director, Jean Yarbrough, didn’t seem particularly adept at it), and you end up with a plodding, hour-long film of l...

House of Dracula

The appeal of House of Frankenstein was one part casting and another part happy accident. Boris Karloff simply made the film, and the subplot about the hunchback Daniels’ unrequited love was solid. House of Dracula has neither of those things. Oh, it still has a mad scientist and a hunchback as well as the three core monsters of Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, but the randomness of the narrative that the earlier mashup was able to paper over is front and center now. We do...

The Mummy’s Curse

For the first ten minutes or so of The Mummy’s Curse, I was surprised. I felt like it was a Mummy movie that I might actually end up liking. Well, that turned out to not be the case. The opening didn’t go through the familiar motions of repeating the setup that the rest of the Kharis films had, and it just went right into its new setting and characters. Was this going to be a decently built hour long film? No, no it wasn’t. It wasn’t as bad as The Mummy’s Ghost, but it didn’t even meet the m...