David Vining's Blog, page 113

The Invisible Woman

The Universal Horror franchise had been toying with comedy for several years, making it more prominent after the change of ownership at Universal Pictures. With The Invisible Woman, though, the franchise reaches full comedy and the results are surprisingly decent. It’s too busy and not all of the comedy really works, but this is a light entertainment that takes a concept first used for really effective horror and makes a little comedy out of it. I’m more okay with that than the unimaginative...

The Mummy’s Hand

The most obvious bit of metadata about this film is the length. The Universal Horror franchise was never about epic runtimes, but, at only 67-minutes, The Mummy’s Hand is really short. It’s so short that it effectively has only two acts. It sort of has a third act in its final five minutes, though that “act” is so quick that I don’t think it could actually qualify. Dual act structures tend to be artier rather than the thing for general audiences, and this doesn’t really feel like a conscious...

The Invisible Man Returns

Here we are. This is really what I had been expecting for the last few entries in the Universal Horror franchise. A rote repeat of what had come before while missing all of the terror of the original without being able to supply anything new. Feeling like it was written by committee to blindly catch what had made the original special, The Invisible Man Returns follows formula with the kind of competence you would expect from Joe May (the man who got Fritz Lang his start in the German film in...

Son of Frankenstein

The Laemmle family lost complete control of Universal Pictures to their creditors during the expensive production of Show Boat, and the new management wanted to focus on less elaborate films. So, after a few years dormant, producer and director Rowland Lee revived the Universal Horror effort with the second sequel to Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein. Returning Boris Karloff for the final time as the monster and inviting Bela Lugosi, at one of the lowest points of his career, Lee leaned more...

Dracula’s Daughter

After the general boredom I felt throughout Werewolf in London, I felt like the best days of the Universal Horror output from the 30s was in the past, that the entirety of quality work came from James Whale, and that Carl Laemmle Jr. simply didn’t know how to make a movie without accidentally hiring the best talent. Well, I was happily surprised by Dracula’s Daughter. It’s more of a psychological drama than a horror movie, limiting its appeal to genre fans I imagine, but the surprisingly ser...

Werewolf of London

Without James Whale or a solid literary source, it seems like Carl Laemmle really didn’t know how to put together a winning monster movie. Using bits and pieces from previous, more successful, efforts Laemmle had produced, he brought in a small host of writers and director Stuart Walker to develop a lot of werewolf lore on the fly while steeping it in some of the dullest, thinnest, and least interesting character-based storytelling so far in this rough assembly of pictures one could call a f...

Blonde

So, I highlighted the trailer. Guess I gotta review it, huh?

I saw someone dub this film Marilyn Monroe: Fire Walk With Me, and that’s quite apt. It doesn’t have the intensity of David Lynch‘s film about a girl trapped in a nightmare on her way towards her inevitable end, but it is a similar path with a heavy arthouse flare to it. Netflix takes extra pains to make sure that everyone knows that this is a fictionalized version of the events of the blonde star’s life. Not being anything of a...

Bride of Frankenstein

This is what every B-movie monster mash wanted to be: a mixture of heady thematic ideas and pure entertainment, but very few ever got it as right as James Whale did in Bride of Frankenstein. Alternatively intelligently advancing the ideas presented in the first Frankenstein film while also providing pure camp as a counterbalance, Bride of Frankenstein is a combination of entertainment and intelligence that expands on the little world created in the original and finds a surprising emotional c...

The Invisible Man

Carl Laemmle Jr. finally got James Whale to come back to make another horror picture, having tried to get him to direct The Mummy, and Whale ended up making one of the least typical of these early films. It’s something between a thriller and a black comedy, and it works remarkably well, all the more impressive since we don’t see the star of the film until the final moment.

Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) arrives in a small, English village, his whole head entire wrapped in bandages and hi...

The Mummy

This third entry in the Universal Monster movies, what was at the time a loose collection of films with generally similar plots and tones, is the first that the lead producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. didn’t base on some piece of 19th century British literature, leaving his screenwriting team, led by John L. Balderston for this film, to come up with something original. Well, without that backbone the director, recent German immigrant and cinematographer Karl Freund (who had previously worked with Mu...