The Wolf Man (1941)

1941
Directed by George Waggner
Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles and Bela Lugosi

So it's come to this.  The final review in Universal Monstober.  Kids, I've done my best to try to tell a story with this series of reviews, no doubt doing just as poor of a job as I do with pretty much everything else.  So P.S. apologies.  But for my legion of fans out there, let's sum it up.

I chose to review the "Mount Rushmore" of Universal Monsters this October.  We've already covered Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, all of which released in either 1931 or 1932, all of which mammoth hits.  The studio kept cranking these things out throughout the '30s, but the short story is this: there were a lot of ups and downs for the Universal horror machine throughout this period.  Sometimes, the highs were glorious, like 1935's classic Bride of Frankenstein, a movie that many consider to be the absolute best movie in the entire "Golden Age of Horror" catalogue.  But then there were the valleys, some of which being financial disappointments in addition to being forgettable.  Trust me, it's the truth, and I'm not going to get into specifics because there's people out there (likely even some people reading this right now) who are way bigger Universal horror connoisseurs than me.  But then 1941 arrived, the lord blessed us with Lon Chaney, and horror was BACK, baby.

Confession time: I'd seen the previous three movies that I reviewed this month years before reviewing them here on the blog, but only bits and pieces of The Wolf Man.  I'd seen the 2010 remake, and really liked it up until the ridiculous CGI wolf battle ending.  So I'm reporting on this film with a fresh perspective, and folks...this movie lives up to every ounce of hype it has. 

For starters, it has an amazing cast.  Just check out those names that I listed above.  Every one of them was also cast perfectly, a cool feat in and of itself, particularly these days when producers just throw whatever names they can on the poster and expect that to desperately sell their crap film before it hits digital 3 months later.  Whoa.  Bitter much?  But this cast really does deserve harping on.  Emotion is key.  It's the key to everything that movies are about, because people, this is why we watch movies:  We watch them to fool ourselves into feeling emotions about things that aren't actually happening to us.  There are many ways to accomplish this, but the tried-and-true method is crafting likable characters, putting them in a perilous situation, and building up to a climax.  This is The Wolf Man.  It's back to basics in every sense of the word, and it's awesome.

The running time on The Wolf Man is 70 minutes.  Once again, it's all lean and mean, which leaves absolutely no time for extraneous bullshit, and I love it.  Meet Larry Talbot, played by Lon Chaney Jr. in legit one of the five or six best horror movie performances I've seen.  He's not as "steal the scene" crazy as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, this guy is all about relatability, so if you're looking for the Jimmy Stewart of horror, this would be it.  He's returning to his home in Wales to reconcile with his father, Sir John (Claude Rains, who is fantastic here - and someday I'll get around to reviewing the the Invisible Man flicks, I promise).  In screenplay terms, your first 10 pages (equivalent to 10 minutes of screen time) are very important, and the movie does a great job hooking you in here as we're introduced to pretty much every main character.  Larry is shown to be a very nice, amicable guy, an everyman in a strange land of decidedly non-Dee Snider proportions, and romantically interested in antique store clerk Gwen Conliffe.  She's played by the gorgeous Evelyn Ankers, and she's both interesting and fantastic to look at.  And then he buys that damn staff.

See, this staff is his in to talk to the clerk, and it has a wolf's head at the end.  From here, there are not just one but TWO crazy fortune-teller type characters, one an actual fortune teller (Maria Ouspenskaya in a landmark performance of weirdness), the other her son Bela (Mr. Lugosi himself).  In between that goodness, we get the romantic plot between Larry and Gwen.  Believe me, it has anything you've seen in the five thousand Twilight movies and every ripoff that came in its wake beat.  But then tragedy strikes as Larry rescues Gwen's friend from an attacking wolf, killing it with his new staff and boasting a brand new bite in the chest from the creature in the process.  Cue the ungodly gypsy woman cutting her promo on Larry telling him that strange, strange things are about to happen to him, and this is where the flick turns really sad. 

The Wolf Man is not scary.  Like, at all.  I've probably said this before in this series of reviews, but it bears repeating: you don't watch this movie for jump scares or to be creeped the fuck out afterward.  As part of the wave of what made up Ground Zero of horror, you watch a movie like this for a fascinating lesson in what storytelling is all about.  As a story, the movie works on pretty much every level.

People grade movies on different scales.  I'm a big structure guy, in addition to emotion.  And really, this script was just perfect by every criteria from a structure standpoint.  It hooks you in with the first 10 minutes on an emotional level, it has a clearly defined three-act structure, and the execution of everything is just amazing.  All of the actors give this thing their all, and it really does make me weep when I have to suffer through stuff in theaters nowadays boasting all of these performers who no doubt have every advantage over the performers from this era and still come off as slackerish emo drones.  The set design is again top notch, with eerie fog, creepy forests and even the dank city streets making up the landscape.  The makeup stuff on the Wolf-ified version of Larry isn't quite the legendary creation that Frankenstein's monster was, but it's still memorable enough.  And the ending really hits you in the gut, even if it is terribly abrupt like seemingly all of the other films from this era are.  Brief bitching moment: I've noticed that a lot of movies before a certain point seemed to just have their ending and then not have any kind of cathartic resolution.  Like, the final thing will happen, and then the credits just roll, and it happens ALL THE TIME.  Anybody else agree, or am I just weird?  But that's not really a complaint, it's just an annoying nitpick.

Thus concludes the first-ever Lick Ness Universal Monstober Review-a-Thon, and I award this movie **** out of ****.  Along with Dracula and Frankenstein, I can't think of a better way to spend your Halloween night.  As for me, I'm unfortunately taking the year off from candy duty on the greatest street in the history of streets this year since October 31st falls on a Monday and I have work at midnight.  That weekend, however, is going to involve lots of Universal monsters, lots of John Carpenter, and more Snickers bars than I can count.  Long live childhood, and happy Halloween.

The Mummy (1932)

1932
Directed by Karl Freund
Starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward van Sloan and Arthur Byron

No Encino Man in sight, kids. (/obligatory Brendan Fraser joke)

One year in to the great Universal horror movie project, literary monsters were already pretty much a craze.  People couldn't get enough of Dracula and Frankenstein the previous year.  Off moderate investments, Universal was raking it in off the backs of characters that were created something like 870 years ago.  There are some things that never change regardless of what era we're talking about, and just like today when Paranormal Activity comes along and we get something like 1,481 found footage films within the next few years, Universal kept cranking out horror movies.  With the two main eventers out of the way, they had to go scrounging for some other stuff.  Undead vampires and scientifically-created monstrosities are hard to beat, but they tried by introducing mummies into the lexicon.

Unlike the last two flicks that I reviewed here on the ol' blog, this one was NOT based on a play.  Instead, it was a totally original creation of screenwriter John L. Balderston, with cues taken from the opening of King Tut's tomb in 1922 and basically nothing else save for a few VERY loose pulls from an Arthur Conan Doyle story.  This time around, the material wasn't QUITE as strong as the stuff they had with the stage plays.  What this movie did have, though, was Karloff.

Ah, yes, Karloff.  The man who was so important in 1932 that they didn't even need to give him a first name on the poster.  Seriously.  Christ himself could have come down from the heavens and implanted his likeness on that poster, and Karloff would have still gotten top billing over him.  After playing Frankenstein, Boris Karloff was like Jesus and John Lennon's collective fame combined, which would also ironically not be the only time that those two would be mentioned in the same breath together.  Wait, what?  All bad jokes aside, Karloff's star was riding high at this point, and this was his movie, baby.  He owns it, he's onscreen a lot, he gets a lot of DIALOGUE in a very refreshing turn, and by all accounts this was where the dude truly cemented himself as one of horror's all-time best leading guys. 

In The Mummy, Karloff is your title character.  The plot, as it is, is given to us essentially within the first five minutes, as a team of archaeologists is in some indeterminate area of Egypt doing the stuff that archaeologists do.  There's lots of dirt, maps, and years being tossed around in the conversation, so you know it's important.  The body of Egyptian priest Imhotep is soon unearthed, and in one of the true "derp" moments in all of horror history, is immediately resurrected when the main characters read from an ancient magical scroll. 

Flash forward 10 years to the present day of 1932, where the main plot of the film unspools.  Something that I wish to comment on, at this point, is the subject of the horror movie romance.  A lot of folks who aren't into this stuff would be surprised by this, but romance is actually a pretty big part of horror history.  King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the masterpiece that is The Return of Swamp Thing...the whole "monster in unrequited love with a woman" is one of my favorite tropes in this genre.  That's our story here, as Imhotep is now wandering around in Egypt under the assumed name of Ardath Bey to find his reincarnated long lost love.  Truly a realistic goal that anyone should aspire to.

Fortunately, this means that we get plenty of Karloff in this movie.  Whenever Ardath Bey is on screen, this movie is greatness.  Yeah, he gets to talk, unlike Frankenstein's monster.  But he's also very good at displaying emotion.  The whole movie hinges on audiences buying Imhotep's desire to find his bride, so Karloff nailing this character like he did was an absolute must. 

The subject of his affection: Helen Grosvenor, a young woman who bears a striking resemblance to his former bride Anck-es-en-Amon (forgive me if I'm wrong there; as of this writing, I just watched this movie a week ago and I'm not operating with Wikipedia benefits this time).  Zita Johann got the call to play Helen, and actually has fantastic chemistry with Karloff in their few scenes together.  Gotta say that I much prefer her to Fay Wray when it came to "romantic damsels in distress" from this period of horror history.  Thus, the whole tragic love plot of The Mummy is one that works very well, with the threat coming in the form of Imhotep/Ardath Bey's resurrection method.  How, you ask?  He has to kidnap Helen, kill her, mummify her and resurrect her with his dead wife's reincarnated soul.  Gruesome stuff, I must say.

What this movie DOESN'T deliver on as much as the previous Universal Monster epics was a well-rounded supporting cast.  The two main archaeologists are a couple of Keystone cops, and the heroine's good guy love interest, while he's a likable enough dude, isn't terribly interesting.  Whenever the movie has that "thrill of the chase" thing going on with the heroes, it loses a bit of steam.  Kind of like The Big Bang Theory whenever it's focused on anyone other than Sheldon.  Alas, there's no R.N. Renfield complete with amazingly creeply laugh equivalent in this film.

All things considered, though, The Mummy is still an effective, emotional little horror film.  Actually, "little" would be a pretty big misnomer, since this was another monster hit for Universal Studios in 1932.  The role that they were on with horror movies at this time was unlike anything that had ever been seen in the movie business at this point, and the public simply couldn't get enough gross-looking tragic monsters, unexpected romance and atmospheric settings.  That's something about this movie that I forgot to mention - the atmosphere is again off the charts, and the production designers on these films were John Matrix-esque commandos when it came to making these movies look ominous and uninviting. 

Rating time: I'll give this flick *** out of ****.  As sure as his name is Boris Karloff, this one is a Thriller.

Frankenstein (1931)

1931
Directed by James Whale
Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff

Welcome back to the Lick Ness Monster October Universal MonsterFest.  Truly a title worthy of any marquee in in the universe!

Universal Studios expected Dracula to be profitable, but not the huge deal that it would become.  When it made enough in 1931 profits to buy a solid-gold island, it didn't take long for them to commission more horror films.  Thus was the beginning of movie studios viewing horror movies as a surefire, low-risk way to make some bucks and scare plenty of people doing it, but it really does stand out once again how much Universal really did seem to LIKE this stuff.  I don't sigh often, but this is truly one of those situations that is sigh-worthy, isn't it?  Can you imagine a movie studio thinking so much of literary horror monsters today that they would devote so much studio space to filming a bunch of them in a row?  Then again, movie studios these days are also pretty much extinct, since virtually nothing is actually filmed in California anymore, but I digress.  But while Dracula was a very successful flick, nothing could have prepared Universal for what was to come with the advent of the freakiest looking monster that cinematic audiences had ever seen in 1931.

Just like Dracula, this movie was based on a stage play rather than a strict adaptation of the original novel.  This move really was a stroke of genius by the Universal brain trust, because it meant that not only were things more filmable, it also meant that a limited number of sets needed to be built.  The basics of the Frankenstein story are here, and surely everyone knows this stuff: nutty, misguided doctor pieces together a human body out of dead people, brings it back to life, mayhem ensues, moral lesson at the end about tampering in God's domain or something. 

Yes, we've gotten movies that are much closer to the original novel.  1994's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is probably the closest, but all these years later, this is still the definitive film version of Frankenstein for many.  Myself included.  What can I say, a lot of people have screw fetishes.  Clearly, this was also true back in the early '30s as this flick made something in excess of $12 million (which was ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH back then) off of its $200,000-some production budget.  I don't throw this word out there often, but that...is scrum-tralascent. (/Will Ferrell)

Yes, this movie does look like a big deal, but it starts in decidedly smaller moments.  Within roughly a minute of screen time, we meet pretty much every main principal human character.  Doctor Victor Frankenstein himself is played by Colin Clive in one of those performances that truly encapsulates the whole "mad scientist" subgenre of characters.  The basics are left intact from the book, as Victor has an assistant (named "Fritz" here, and his hunchback is truly the stuff of legend) and a fiance, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), who is worried that the guy she is marrying spends so much time in a creepy watch tower.  Eh, don't worry about it, honey.  I'm just...thinking up here.  It doesn't take long for the movie to give us a true laugh-out-loud moment as Fritz manages to steal the WRONG BRAIN to put in the beast that they're pasting together from MacGyver-style used parts, resulting in a creature that doesn't quite behave the way the good doctor wants.

So yeah, ol' Victor is obsessed with wringing death from life and actually manages to do it (complete with lots of nifty electrical set imagery, special effects and that legendary "It's alive!" scene that I knew well as a fan of Weird Science).  But the movie really kicks it up a notch when the creature himself makes his first appearance.  Played by Boris Karloff, with makeup coming straight out of the 1931 population's nightmares, the character is an icon for a reason.  It might not have been quite what Mary Shelley intended when she wrote the book, as director James Whale definitely went for the more "shock and awe" approach.  In this reporter's opinion, the move paid off big time.  How?  This flick is in the godforsaken Library of Congress Film Registry.  So suck on it, accuracy Nazis.

After a couple close calls and a couple notches in the movie's body count, the creature escapes.  This is where the movie really shows its true power, as both the script and Karloff do a phenomenal job getting us to care about the monster.  Now, I'm not going to give everyone a fourth-grade level English class lecture about what we're going for here with this story, but it is a tragedy.  The middle portion of Frankenstein consists largely of the monster wandering around in the countryside interacting with various town denizens.  The BEST sequence in the movie consists of his meeting with a little girl where he learns to skip rocks.  Only little girls don't skip like rocks.  Really, really awesome, powerful stuff, but this is also the incident that clues the rest of the world in on the existence of the beast.  Time for the angry mob to grab their pitchforks...

Yeah, there's room to nitpick here with some of the script decisions.  The fact that Frankenstein escapes at the end has always sat at least a little wrong with me since his fate in the book seemed so much better and more poetic, but it really doesn't matter in the least bit.  This is a movie that's all about kinetic energy.  It starts off moving really fast and just keeps moving.  Not in the crappy way that Michael Bay likes to do it; this stuff actually makes sense.  It's refreshingly brisk at something like 75 minutes.  The horror stuff is all quick and relatively painless.  The emotional scenes hit just the right notes in that timeframe.  Even the performances have this really cool little sense of urgency, with everyone seeming to talk and move just a little faster than usual.  Karloff was so awesome here that he would parlay his fame from the movie into a career that lasted another 30 years, almost exclusively in the horror genre. 

In short, there's a reason why this movie has managed to stay popular for 70-odd years.  Yeah, it's a history lesson and you're not going to be pissing yourself in terror.  But in terms of history, you're not going to get much better than Frankenstein.  Oh, and I once carved a jack-o-lantern of Boris Karloff's creature face.  Yeah.  October. 

Without guilt, bah Gawd, I award this flick **** out of ****.  Everyone should check this movie out at least once in their life, because it's basically moviemaking 101.

Dracula (1931)

1931
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan

Cue your Ozzy Osbourne song of choice.  October is finally here!

Yes, folks, Halloween season.  Samhain.  The celebration of the harvest, whatever you want to call it, the most glorious time of the year has arrived, and we're ringing it in with style here on the Lick Ness Monster blog.  I'm sure that all...eight of my subscribers will appreciate it.  Kidding aside, this month will always have a special place in my heart for reasons that I've waxed rhapsodic about endlessly already.  You all know about the Greatest Street in the History of Streets that I grew up on that still gets 1,000+ visitors every year on October 31st, my past with the Friday the 13th series and how it quite literally saved my life in 2007-08, my ten favorite horror villains, every movie in the freakin' Halloween franchise.  Yes, folks, we've had some good times here on the blog over the years.  And now, we're covering pretty much ground zero of American horror films - the Universal Monster Movies.

Now, I know some people who are just absolute connoisseurs of the Universal House of Horror.  For the uninitiated, this was pretty much IT when it came to horror in the golden era of Hollywood.  Universal Studios had the rights to do the movies to all of the big literary monsters at the time, and while they weren't quite as much of a factory as Britain's Hammer Studios would be in the '50s and beyond, they cranked these things out at a pretty impressive rate.  Sequels, spinoffs, crossovers, even parody movies, they did it all with these classic characters.  Thus, while the movies aren't all that scary today, they're worth watching for the history lesson alone.

Fortunately, they're worth watching for much more than that, because I highly doubt that anyone reading this besides myself watches these flicks for their historical context.  Hell, most people on Facebook seem to exclusively care about baby pictures and food selfies.  So if you're looking to have fun, these movies are also a good place to start.  Watching these films today, it immediately becomes clear just how PROUD Universal Studios was of this output.  It's not like back in the '80s, when Paramount was so embarrassed by Friday the 13th that a book was eventually released where just about everyone involved in it did nothing but trash the thing.  'Cus, you know, you're all such amazing actors that getting killed by Jason is what you're best known for.  Not so here.  These movies had big budgets, big promotion, big casts, slick scenery, you name it.  It was all in the presentation, and it would only get better with time.  But every dynasty has to start somewhere, and it started in 1931 with a director named Tod Browning and the first truly epic film version of Dracula.

There had been Dracula flicks before this one, but...well, they sucked.  They were either silent (color me uncultured, but I just can't get into silent movies) or bad.  Universal pulled out all the stops with this one, taking a script based on a 1924 stage play, trotting out character actor extraordinaire Bela Lugosi as a Svengali-esque titular vampire, and a whole lotta fog.  And that would make a hell of a Led Zeppelin song (/bad joke).  Pretty much any Dracula movie comes down to four elements: (1) The dude playing Dracula; (2) The way that the writers decide to interpret Bram Stoker's original novel; (3) The supporting characters; and (4) The atmosphere.  Having said that, let's look at how it played out on the big stage here.

You'd be hard-pressed to find to find many critics out there who express anything other than the utmost respect for Bela Lugosi here, and it's well-deserved.  The movie is far from a direct interpretation of the book; that much is established when the guy's all-powerful telepathic ability becomes his biggest superpower early in the film.  Simply put, Lugosi is money.  Every time the guy speaks, you believe every word he says.  That's another thing about watching old movies - the acting was much more theatrical and unrealistic, but it's infinitely more memorable.  Bela Lugosi is memorable, amazing, and projects just the right amount of menace.  If you've seen the movie Ed Wood, you know how the guy eventually turned out in real life, and it lends watching this movie a little sadness that actually ADDS to the poignancy.  +2 cool points for Bela Lugosi.

The story.  What sets this movie apart from everything that came before and after was how much of a focus it has on the Renfield character.  In this movie, he's played by the unreal Dwight Frye, and he has the greatest creepy laugh in the history of cinema.  People who have read the book know the basics of the Dracula story, so I won't reiterate it here, but it's Renfield who gets the focus instead of Harker in the early goings before setting up shop in a sanitorium that oh-so-conveniently adjoins Carfax Abbey, Dracula's new digs in London.  Mina is now Dr. Seward's daughter, she is still engaged to Jonathan Harker, and Lucy is still the family friend who becomes Dracula's first victim.  However, there's a big focus on the unsavory side of Victorian life in this go-round as the sanitorium becomes one of the movie's key locales.  It's different, but it works.  Oh, and in addition to Dracula turning into a bat and sucking blood, he constantly hypnotizes people with his creepy stare.  And the vampire killer himself, Dr. Van Helsing?  Yeah, he's here, and he's just as much of an ass-kicker as ever.

Moving on, we focus on the characters.  Personal opinion here, but I think there was a point in cinema history (probably sometime in the '50s) when the art of fleshing out characters truly hit its stride.  Thus, we have paper-thin cardboard cutouts here, but they're paper-thin cardboard cutouts that are played with plenty of energy and zeal.  Edward Van Sloan was especially good as Van Helsing  The only person who I didn't respond to strongly here was David Manners as Harker.  For some reason, I've never seen a truly good portrayal of Harker on film.  Ironically, the best might actually be Steven Weber in the freakin' Mel Brooks parody movie.  Other than Lugosi, though, I gotta go back and give more props to Dwight Frye's performance as Renfield.  So much focus is put on him, and he was totally up to it, not caring in the least about acting - and looking - like an ass.  Seriously, this guy cranks up the grease to Philip Seymour Hoffman levels, and he doesn't even care.  Can't give him enough 85-years-late kudos.

Finally, let's look at the atmosphere.  I've touched on it already, but we got glorious black-and-white darkness, fog, and visuals that just look like a funeral dirge.  It works really well with all of the stuff in the sanitorium, although, I'll confess, it doesn't hold a candle to the sheer Gothic madness of the Hammer Dracula films.  Personal preference, glandular condition, call it whatever you want.

Overall, this is a really fun, really QUICK (the running time is 70 minutes - I wish more modern movies would take this example) watch that you can pop in any ol' time and be entertained.  *** 1/2 out of ****, and it's nothing if not a very solid start to a very solid line-up of classic monsters.  And we're just getting started...