Posts Tagged ‘Universal’


The Land Unknown

March 15th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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rating:
company: Universal International
year: 1957
runtime: 78′
country: United States
director: Virgil Vogel
cast: Jock Mahoney, Shirley Patterson,
William Reyolds, Henry Brandon,
Douglas Kennedy, Phil Harvey,
Ralph Brooks, Kenner G. Kemp
writers: Charles Palmer,
Laszlo Gorog and Willam N. Robson
cinematography: Ellis W. Carter
music: Joseph Gershenson (supervisor)
special effects: Orien Ernest, Jack Kevan,
Fred Knoth, Roswell A. Hoffman,
Ray Binger, Clifford Stine
disc company: Universal Studios
Home Entertainment
release date: May 13, 2008
retail price: $59.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 2.35:1 / anamorphic / progressive
audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic (English)
subtitles: English SDH, French
currently only available as part of the
Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2
order this disc set from Amazon.com

Plot: A group of US Navy explorers and a female reporter crash land in a prehistoric oasis dominated by huge dinosaurs while exploring Antarctica in a helicopter.

This relatively expensive Universal effects production from 1957 pillages plot elements from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land That Time Forgot while foregoing the drama, action, and excitement of either.  One need only look at the number of effects credits versus other studio science fiction productions of the decade to see that reasonable amounts of money passed hands with this one, but what a waste!

The dull story begins with a bit of dull expositional film-within-a-film, a briefing of a soon-to-begin Antarctic expedition that director Virgil Vogel (Invasion of the Animal People, The Mole People) allows to run in real time.  That is, until it is interrupted by the infinitely more interesting Shirley Patterson (credited as Shawn Smith), as reporter Hathaway, enters the scene.  Commander Roberts (stunt man and Western regular Jock Mahoney) and his underlings react in the expected fashion, encircling the poor woman as though they’ve been ignorant of the basics of human biology for the past 30 years of their lives.

The expedition, to investigate the Antarctic and, more specifically, a warm region discovered their some years earlier, is put underway in short order, though Vogel keeps the pacing at little more than a steady slog.  Commander Roberts, the reporter, a Lieutenant (William Reynolds, Cult of the Cobra, The Thing That Couldn’t Die) and a machinest (Phil Harvey, The Monolith Monsters) hop in a helicopter and take it for a spin, but a side-swipe from a pterodactyl sends them crashing (slowly, per the rest of the picture) into the interior of a volcano.  What they find there is a lost world full of strange plants, dinosaurs, and an endless supply of fog.

Surprisingly little happens from this point forward.  Sure, dinosaurs chase people and a giant carnivorous plant tries to feel up the lovely Miss Hathaway a number of times, but no one is ever put in any real danger.  The chief dramatic impetus arrives with Hunter, a bearded man from a previous expedition who has been living in the prehistoric haze for a decade.  Hunter has the parts the men need to fix their helicopter, but he wants Hathaway for himself.  The usual melodrama and fist-fights result, but Hunter is eventually convinced to give up the parts, allowing the lot of them fly out of the volcano for good.  Only their wardrobes seem worse for wear for their trouble.

There’s nothing wrong with The Land Unknown that better scripting couldn’t have fixed.  The CinemaScope frame is filled with vast sets and complicated process photography, but the story by Palmer, Gorog and Robson keeps the action within it to a barely acceptable minimum.  Editor turned director Vogel would (wisely) move into the greener pastures of television after this, directing only a handful of other feature films before his death in 1996.  His handling of proceedings here is about as accomplished as the limp scripting would allow for. The Mole People‘s tale of subterranean Sumerians endeavoring to steal John Agar’s flash light seems almost exciting by comparison.  Almost.  Jock Mahoney seems terribly miscast, and he delivers every line with the same squint-eyed stoicism.  Henry Brandon puts in the most effort, turning the role of the man lost into one of the film’s few high points, while the under-appreciated Shirley Patterson, whose acting career was shortly to go the way of the dinosaurs, is given precious little to do other than look perpetually concerned and scream when necessary.

The film’s monsters were featured prominently in the exciting ad artwork and were undoubtedly responsible for selling the majority of tickets.  It’s a pity they’re so utterly unconvincing.  The star of the show is an anatomically improbable Tyrannosaurus Rex, a rubber suit featuring a massive, toothy skull perched atop a lumpy and incongruously small body.  One can’t help but feel sorry for whatever poor technician was shoved inside to operate the thing, waddling around the intricate prehistoric sets on its stumpy little legs.  A mechanized Elasmosaur (a sad precursor to Bruce the shark) improves upon the Tyrannosaurus in design, if not implementation.  The creature creeps anemically through the wave pool it inhabits, hissing at all who dare to enter its domain (which the full cast naturally does, and often).  A stiff pterodactyl mock-up and a pair of dueling monitor lizards round out the film’s unimpressive creature attractions.

Universal Studio Home Entertainment’s DVD of the film, originally part of the Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volume 2 and now re-packaged with The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2, is nice at least.  The film comes double-booked with the far less inspired The Deadly Mantis, a loathsome sci-fi from the same year that offers up a neat looking monster puppet but little else.

While a Scope transfer did make its way to laserdisc in the late 1990s, most are familiar with The Land Unknown via its pan-and-scanned television and VHS masters.  The 16:9 enhanced 2.35:1 transfer on Universal’s DVD improves upon all of the previous releases, exhibiting strong contrast and sharp detail.  Uninteresting as the film itself may be it looks great here, with only the stock footage inserts (frequent towards the beginning and end of the picture) showing much in the way of damage.  Audio is delivered via a nice Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track and the stock music cues (from composers Henry Mancini, Heinz Roemheld, Hans J. Seiter, and Herman Stein) sound fantastic, and far more interesting than the dialogue.  Optional English SDH and French subtitles are available for the feature.  A battered trailer is the only supplement.

The fans are obviously out there this one, and Universal’s DVD comes highly recommended to them.  The film itself  isn’t terrible, all in all.  It’s just not very good, and I doubt I’ll ever understand its healthy 6.0 score at the IMDB.  The Land Unknown rates as a mostly forgettable affair (Irwin Allen’s hysterical 1960 obliteration of The Lost World offers more excitement, intentional or otherwise, and in color to boot),  and I don’t feel bad advising most to give it amiss all together.  Not recommended.


King Kong vs. Godzilla

January 29th, 2010 | article by | 4 Comments »
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part of the Goin’ Bananas B-movie roundtable:

rating:
companies: Universal International
and Toho Company Ltd.
year: 1963
runtime: 91′
countries: United States / Japan
directors: Ishiro Honda
and Thomas Montgomery
cast: Michael Keith, Harry Holcombe,
James Yagi, Tadao Takashima,
Kenji Sahara, Ichiro Arishima,
Yu Fujiki, Jun Tazaki, Akihiko Hirata
writers: Paul Mason
and Bruce Howard
music: Peter Zinner (supervisor)
dvd company: Universal Studios Home Entertainment
release date: November 29, 2005
retail price: $14.98
details: Region 1 / NTSC / Single Layer
feature: progressive / 2.31:1 anamorphic
audio: Dolby Digital English (2.0 Mono)
subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French
order this film from Amazon.com
single disc | double feature with King Kong Escapes

Plot: A television executive has King Kong imported to Japan while Godzilla is simultaneously unleashed from his imprisonment in an iceberg.  The two march inexorably towards each other, leading to an epic final battle atop Mount Fuji.

Like all the earliest of Toho’s science fiction and fantasy films (Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, Gigantis the Fire Monster, Half Human, Varan the Unbelievable, The H-Man, Gorath, The Human Vapor, and The Last War in particular), King Kong vs. Godzilla was altered considerably for importation into the American market.  In this case co-producer John Beck, working from a treatment by an uncredited and unpaid Willis O’Brien, was given full reign over how Toho’s production would be presented in the States as part of his contract with the company.  The end result is a film almost entirely unique from the Japanese original, and one of the most altered Toho productions outside of Crown International’s treatment of Varan the Unbelievable.

In its original form King Kong vs. Godzilla is much less science fiction than comedy, a satire of television marketing.  Producer Beck was none too pleased with the light-hearted sensibilities of the picture and sought, with his version, to present audiences with the more traditional monster romp they were undoubtedly expecting.  His success in this regard was minimal, his efforts to improve things rendering King Kong vs. Godzilla an unintentional comedy rather than an overt one.

Taking a cue from Terry Morse’s financially successful redux of Godzilla: King of the Monsters! a few years earlier, Beck oriented his film around newly-shot sequences featuring news reporters in the United States (Michael Keith, The Worm Eaters) and Japan (James Yagi, of The Outer Limits episode The Hundred Years of the Dragon).  Neither Michael Keith or James Yagi had the star credentials of Raymond Burr, who had appeared as the villainous Lars Thorwald in Hitchcock’s Rear Window just two years before his turn as Steve Martin in Godzilla: King of the Monsters!.  More unfortunately, Beck’s integration of their sequences into the film proper is poor at best.  They play as little more than lengthy info-dumps between the Japanese footage and stop the pacing of the film cold.

Michael Keith plays UN reporter Eric Carter, who communicates with James Yagi’s Omura via stock inserts of the alien satellite from The Mysterians.  Beck must have been working under considerable financial limitation here, as the two sets the reporters occupy have all the depth and realism of a sub-par grade school shoebox diorama.  Each comes complete with a ‘television’, or rather a piecing together of cardboard slabs upon which crumpled monochrome prints of shots from the film are stuck.  It’s sad stuff, indeed, and a far cry from the comparably lavish production values of the rest of the picture.


Harry Holcombe (The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, Empire of the Ants), the most accomplished of the American cast by a wide margin, appears as Dr. Arnold Johnson, who is perhaps the worst paleontologist in screen history.  Using a children’s picture book as a visual aid, Johnson explains to reporter Carter that the recently appeared Godzilla may well be a cross between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Stegosaurus while comparing his brain to a marble and recommending that electricity might be a viable offensive measure against him (given that he’s a reptile, as though his being anything else would make him any less susceptible to electrocution).  Yes, it is as dreadful as it sounds, though not entirely without its unintentional comic charm.

The English overdubbing of the Japanese footage isn’t nearly so bad as it could have been here, besting Columbia’s for the earlier Battle in Outer Space and a marked improvement over the endless narration found in Half Human or Gigantis the Fire Monster, though Beck’s attempts to play the film straight appear to have been lost in translation.  Television executive Mr. Tako (the wonderful Ichiro Arishima) still comes across as a daft madman and Furue (Yu Fujiki) still plays the bumbling sidekick to Sakurai’s (Tadao Takashima) straight man.  Furue provides one of the most memorable parts of the dubbed version, introducing a minor subplot about his corns and how they ache when monsters are afoot.  The dubbing even improves upon the original Japanese in one respect, making the American submarine crew sound less like the amateur actors they are.

Beck’s King Kong vs. Godzilla runs just 91 minutes, five minutes shy of the original running time, but I’d wager that no more than 75-80% of the original survived the editing process.  Lost is much of the early character development, replaced by Beck’s bricks of exposition.  Perhaps the biggest loss is in the soundtrack department, where Ifukube’s score (one of the very best of his career) is replaced with stock tracks from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Monster that Challenged the World, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, among others.  The stock tracks aren’t bad by any means, but their unconnected bundle of disparate themes can’t compare with the power of Ifukube’s work.


Thankfully, the majority of the monster footage remains intact, less a few shots here and there.  Reviews of the film in America more or less ignored the dramatic inadequacy of the film, focusing on the aptitude of the Japanese effects crew instead.  In this respect Beck’s King Kong vs. Godzilla still makes for an entertaining watch, in spite of its disparaging ineptitude in other areas.

Universal, who released the film domestically as Universal International in 1963, missed a grand opportunity to present a deluxe edition of this film when it chose to bring it to DVD in 2005, but such is the nature of the business.  Those looking for the uncut original will have to rely on Toho’s own expensive home video iterations, as this Universal Studios Home Entertainment DVD caters only to the American release version of the film.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is in a horrendous state of preservation in its native Japan, and Toho’s recent high definition restoration had to rely, in part, on an awful standard definition video master from the ’90s in order to account for footage in too sad a shape to be transferred.  Universal’s print is in comparatively excellent shape, with much of the footage lost in the Japanese restoration appearing nearly pristine here.  The 2.35:1 progressive and anamorphic widescreen transfer presents the film in its original aspect ratio for the first time on American shores and, save for some damage (dust and scratches), its a beauty.  Beck’s additions to the drama look even cheaper in the original scope, while Eiji Tsuburaya’s effects production shines.  Audio is English only Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic, with optional English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles available.

The single layer disc boasts absolutely nothing in the way of supplemental material, not even a trailer.  Still, the price is low (at least for the double bill with King Kong Escapes) and the quality of transfer high, making it worth the upgrade from the awful pan-and-scan Goodtimes releases that have been kicking around for the past decade plus.  Fans will certainly want to indulge.


Tarantula!

January 25th, 2010 | article by | 1 Comment »
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rating:
company: Universal International
year: 1955
runtime: 80′
country: United States
director: Jack Arnold
cast: John Agar, Mara Corday,
Leo G. Carroll, Nestor Paiva,
Ross Elliot, Edwin Rand,
Raymond Bailey, Hank Patterson
writers: Robert M. Fresco,
Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold
cinematographer: George Robinson
music: Joseph Gershenson (supervisor)
special effects: David S. Horsley,
Clifford Stine and Wah Chang (puppet creator)
dvd company: Universal Studios Home Entertainment
release date: January 2, 2007 / May 13, 2008
retail price: $19.99 / $59.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 4:3 open matte / progressive
audio: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic)
subtitles: English SDH, French
order this film from Amazon.com
OOP 2007 collection | 2008 Ultimate Collection

Plot: A scientist investigating a new growth serum in the Arizona desert inadvertently lets an ever-growing tarantula loose on the countryside.  It’s up to a country doctor, local law enforcement, and the air force to stop the beast.

Tarantula! is the prototypical ’50s monster picture, and one in a long line in which the creeping unknown descends upon small-town America.  Throughout the decade the Rockwellian fantasy would be invaded by fifty foot women, perverse space brains, blobs, and even an econonomy-sized crystal garden.  Tarantula! also fits well into the cold war atomic paranoia of the time, and while the bomb doesn’t play a role in the titular creature’s creation (the closest we get is an isotope that holds the good scientist’s growth formula together) the idea of science creating an unstoppable and inhumanly huge force of destruction is of obvious inspiration.

Made just a few years before Universal International’s science fiction cycle would descend into low-budget idiocy (I’m looking at you, Monster on the Campus), Tarantula! is a solid production with a name cast and memorable iconography.  The sight of the title creature cresting hills and progressing with all deliberate speed across the desert landscapes, devouring cattle and people and downing power lines along the way, is hard to forget.

Typical for the genre, Tarantula! plays as a mystery – that the audience is in on the solution ten minutes in is of little consequence.  Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar) is called in when a horribly disfigured man is found dead of unknown causes in the desert.  Hastings determines that the man died of complications from acromagaly (a syndrome caused by an excess of growth hormone), a diagnosis confirmed when Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) arrives in town to identify the body.  The man turns out to have been Deemer’s assistant, his acromagaly having appeared and progressed to life threatening proportions in just a few short days.

Hasting, knowing that acromagaly is a condition that takes years to develop, senses that something is amiss and, with the help of Deemer’s newly arrived assistant Steve (Mara Corday), starts an investigation into the matter.  Steve lets Hastings in on what Deemer is working on in his laboratory outside town – an artificial nutrient he hopes will help alleviate the food shortages of the future.  Injected into test animals, like mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits, the nutrient results in spectacular growth, with the test subjects reaching maturity in a matter of hours.



Meanwhile, strange things are happening outside of town.  A rancher finds the bones of part of his cattle herd lying in a field, a truck is mysteriously thrown tens of yards off the road, and a pair of prospectors go missing.  The only evidence connecting the incidents are the large puddles of liquid left behind at each – liquid that, when tested, reveals itself to be a kind of venom . . .

There is certainly silliness afoot in Tarantula! – take the acromagaly subplot that links the cast together, for instance.  The cause of the condition seems to be “instability” in the nutrient, which Deemer’s assistant had been injected with for dubious scientific reasons.  Why would men inject themselves with a nutrient that causes uncontrollable growth in test animals and, for that matter, what are they doing injecting something like a tarantula with it?  Methinks that if Deemer and company had settled on something quick-growing and harmless like fruit flies as test subjects then this whole mess could have been avoided.  Then again, a title like Fruit Flies! doesn’t offer quite the number of horrifying possibilities that Tarantula! does.

Of course silliness in a film like Tarantula! is obligatory, and Jack Arnold’s Them!-inspired yarn is more than competent enough in its dramatics to keep things from diving headlong into self-parody (a la Beginning of the End).  John Agar and Mara Corday make a fine leading couple even if the script offers them little of substance.  Corday’s working girl is more typical of the genre here than in the later The Giant Claw (as she tells Deemer before heading into town, “Science is science, but a girl must get her hair done”), though she’s still far from the usual scream queen, only reduced to hysterics when giant spiderlegs are tapping at her window.  The supporting cast are familiar faces – Ross Elliot (Monster on Campus, The Indestructible Man) as Joe the reporter, Nestor Paiva (The Mole People) as the town sheriff, and bit actor and Bert I. Gordon regular Hank Patterson (Earth vs. the Spider, Beginning of the End, Attack of the Puppet People, etc.) as Josh, the nosy desk clerk.

Leo G. Carroll as the not-mad scientist Professor Deemer is the most recognizable actor on board, lending much-needed believability to the part of the noble scientist gone wrong.  The Hitchcock regular (Suspicion, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest) was immortalized forever for his involvement in Tarantula!, his part one of many of classic sci-fi-dom evoked in the “Science Fiction/Double Feature” number from The Rocky Horror Show.  Carroll takes the role in stride, even when donning his own ridiculous acromagaly prosthetics and tangling with a life-sized tarantula limb.



The real star of the show is, of course, the tarantula, actually several directed around white plaster molds of filmed landscapes with compressed air.  Veteran Universal effects man David S. Horsley (Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London, This Island Earth) and the accomplished Clifford Stine (King Kong, Gunga Din, This Island Earth) get away with a fare share of flubs, like the spider’s legs suddenly disappearing behind invisible matte lines and the occasional transparency of the menace, by virtue of how often their techniques simply work.  The visages of the monster creeping down hillsides, growing ever larger as it stalks its prey, are impressive in their dimensionality and even creepy.  Wah Chang’s scale puppet, plastered all over the advertising for the film, is wisely avoided, but is seen briefly leering (as salaciously as a spider reasonably can) at future Playmate Corday through a gigantic bedroom window (a scene copied outright for 1957′s The Deadly Mantis).

Universal Studios Home Entertainment took its sweet time bringing Tarantula! to DVD domestically, finally releasing it in the boxed set Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volume 1 in 2007, alongside The Mole People, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Monolith Monsters, and Monster on the Campus.  That Best Buy exclusive release went out-of-print in short order and was fetching ridiculous prices through third party sellers (this reviewer made a pretty penny offing his in preparation for the repackaged release) before Universal repackaged it, along with the second installment (including Dr. Cyclops, Cult of the Cobra, The Land Unknown, The Deadly Mantis, and The Leech Woman), as The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2 in May of 2008.  The film is not currently available in the States as an individual release.

Tarantula! comes paired with The Mole People on a dual layered DVD (oddly the only disc of the first set not to feature an image of Mara Corday), and the ostensibly single layer transfer greatly improves upon the previously available laserdisc and VHS editions.  The progressive image sports healthy grain, detail, and contrast, but is unfortunately presented open matte.  While the film still plays well full screen, those with widescreen televisions will find that it crops perfectly to a 16:9 set (I’ve cropped the images for this review to 1.78:1 give a representation of the originally intended framing).  Damage is present throughout but not terribly invasive, limited to light dirt and speckling in most instances.  Audio is presented in a nice Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track in the original English.  The older recording still retains some nice punch, particularly when the Henry Mancini cues from This Island Earth come into play.  Both English SDH and French subtitles are available.

The only extra to be had on the disc is a trailer in rough shape, but don’t let that deter you as the 10 film The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2 is still a great buy for fans (it can be had new for around $4.50 per film on Amazon.com).  As both an old-school genre fanatic and a long-time tarantula keeper, Tarantula! is nothing short of a minor classic for me in spite of its frequent silliness, and as an archetypal example of the B-budget monster opus it’s hard to beat.  Highly recommended.


The Old Dark House

January 15th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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company: Universal Pictures
year: 1932
runtime: 72′
country: USA
director: James Whale
cast: Melvyn Douglas, Lilian Bond,
Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff,
Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey,
Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore
writers: Benn W. Levy, R.C. Sherriff
cinematographer: Arthur Edeson
music: David Broekman
order this film from Amazon.com

The married couple of Margaret (Gloria Stuart) and Philip (Raymond Massey) Waverton and their car guest Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) whose connection with the two is never quite explained, are driving through the Welsh countryside during a spectacular rainstorm. As it is usual in cases like this, they have lost their way completely and the couple is bitching at each other with some aplomb, while Penderel proceeds to sing sarcastically.

Fortunately, this very special kind of revelry is broken by a landslide. The trio and their car barely manage to find their way to the titular old dark house, which is the only place where they can find shelter before they are all blown away by the forces of nature.

Rather less fortunate for them are the inhabitants they find inside. Head of the household seems to be Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger), an older gentleman who acts terribly afraid of something or someone within the house, at least when he is not passive-aggressively bickering with his sister Rebecca (Eva Moore). Rebecca herself is half deaf (at least when she wants to be) and in the grip of some sort of religious mania caused by old wounds from the relationship with her long-dead sister that makes her rather nasty to young pretty women like Margaret. This assortment of weird characters is completed by the siblings’ servant Morgan (Boris Karloff), a mute, bearded, less than friendly seeming sort of fellow (and since this is a film from 1932, he is in fact not friendly). The siblings inform their guests merrily that he tends to get quite violent when drunk.


While everyone’s still getting acquainted and/or scaring the shit out of each other, another pair of weather refugees arrives to make the cast complete for now. It is the jolly seeming Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and the woman whose sugar daddy without sexual benefits he plays, Gladys Perkins (Lilian Bond). Gladys and Penderel are really hitting it off, and after they have known each other for about ten minutes, he is all good and ready to propose marriage to her.

Their romance will have to wait a little, though, because the night will be filled with the escapades of Boris Karloff doing Frankenstein’s monster in drunk and mean, creepy giggling by the Femm’s ancient father (for no clear reason and very obviously played by a woman, Elspeth Dudgeon in her film debut), and another, fire-loving surprise family member.

For some time, James Whale’s The Old Dark House was thought to be lost, but after some adventures in film restoration the movie is now watchable on an excellent DVD by Kino. I must say that I find it quite disturbing that even a film like this – produced by a major studio like Universal and directed by someone as highly acclaimed as Whale – can come so close to being lost.

Having said that, I also have to add that I am not as completely enamored of the film a some of my acquaintances are. This isn’t to say that I don’t find The Old Dark House worth watching, but it is far from perfect and far from being Whale’s best film.


But let’s talk about the film’s good sides first. First and foremost, there is Whale’s sure-handed direction, with the typical atmospheric and adventurous use of shadow and light you will find complimented in every single review of one of Whale’s films ever written. Whale is also enthusiastically avoiding the stagey feel that drags down many of the films of his contemporaries. While there is quite obviously only a very small number of sets, the director is not satisfied with just letting stiffly arranged actors talk at each other (which is the typical way an old dark house movie would be set up). Instead, there is much more movement on display than usual. A feeling of liveliness pervades the film, making it very much the stylistic opposite of the Poverty Row films that define the Old Dark House genre.

Also quite excellent is the acting. While I wouldn’t call any of the characters very original even for 1932, the script does its best to give most of them a little more depth than usual or strictly necessary. Laughton’s Porterhouse for example is not just an obnoxious loudmouth with a talent for making money, but someone who hides the pain the loss of his wife brought him behind it. His relationship with Gladys is not based on sex, but rather on a mixture of blunt honesty and real affection, and a way for Porterhouse to cope with the loneliness he feels after the death of his wife. The film doesn’t show Gladys as a gold digger, and therefore doesn’t feel the need to punish her for living her life. This aspect of the film has a the sort of proper grown-up feel to it Hollywood would soon have to give up for the trite moralizing the censor expected of it.

I have to say that I have my problems with the Gladys/Penderel love aspect of the script. It is not that they fall in love (Lilian Bond and Melvyn Douglas do have a good bit of chemistry going on between them), but really the absurd tempo in which it happens that bugs me. It is unavoidable in a film that takes place in a single night, yet still manages to strain my suspension of disbelief more than mad relatives in the attic.


The film’s second and larger problem is also the script’s fault. It is the nearly complete absence of a plot for much of the running time, as well as the movie’s near Italian exploitation-like avoidance of really putting the motivations and elements it contains together to make something like a whole, until everything culminates in a badly set up, hyperactive finale.

What would ruin another film completely only drags The Old Dark House down from the chance of being a great film to being a good one. Whale’s visual mastership and the excellent acting ensemble are a joy to watch, and I’m more than willing to overlook sloppy plotting in favour of mood and character depth.

Some modern viewers will also have their problems with the way the film shows its age – women belong in cupboards when it is getting dangerous, mentally ill people roll their eyes and giggle before they are going to kill you, etc etc. Like most art, The Old Dark House is a product of its time, for better and for worse, and like with most art, we have to live with this, or will probably not be able to relate to it at all.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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