King Kong (1933)

Okay, I know. Who hasn't seen this movie? Show of hands. All right, so maybe you haven't seen this movie, but you've surely seen Peter Jackson's CGI-fest from 2005. Or maybe you saw that stinker they did back in the 70s with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges. At any rate, you know the story, right? Show man Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong, in 1933) sails off to the south seas with a film crew including Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) and Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). They sail to the mysterious Skull Island, where they find that the natives have built a colossal wall to protect themselves from the creatures that live on the island. Chief among these is Kong, the 24-foot tall gorilla. Ann - being white and blond - is soon kidnapped by the natives and sacrificed to Kong, who takes her to his jungle lair. But Kong doesn't eat her, as he has done with all of the unfortunate native girls. No, he's completely enamoured of her, and protects her from all danger. Well, the boys from the ship naturally go after Ann, and a good many of them are killed in the process. Only Jack succeeds in reaching her. Together, they escape from Kong, while he's busy fending off a pterodactyl. When Kong realizes that Ann is gone, he pursues them, reaching the giant wall just as they're closing the gate behind Ann and Jack. But Kong's not gonna let a little thing like a stone wall stand in the way of true love. He bashes through the gate and stomps the snot out of the native village in his search for Ann. Eventually, he's felled by "gas bombs," which apparently are hand grenades fill with sleeping gas. Never heard of them before. Oh well. Kong is down, and Denham has a new exhibit for his show. When we next see Kong, he's chained to a post in an auditorium. Kong makes quick work of the chains and storms out of the theater in search of Ann. Along the way, he pauses to take in the sights, to terrorize a few innocent bystanders, and crush an elevated train. But true love leads Kong to Ann's window, and the long arm of Kong reaches in and gets her (talk about stalkers - he's the greatest). Kong climbs to the top of the Empire State Building with Ann in tow. There, we have the iconic battle between Kong and the airplanes. Kong may have been king of the jungle, but he's no match again modern air power. Mortally wounded, Kong plummets to his death just as Jack reaches the top of the Empire State Building and rescues Ann. When someone says to Denham, "Looks like the planes got him," Denham replies, "It was beauty killed the beast."

Does any of that sound familiar? It should. The movie's only been made three times now. Why? Cuz it's a darn good story, and that's one thing that Hollywood seems to be in short supply of these days. So they just keep remaking older movies and turning old cartoons into movies. But, in my humble opinion, nine times out of ten, the remake cannot compete with the original. Such is the case with King Kong. Don't get me wrong. Those other versions are fine movies in their own right, but they are copies of something that was done so well that it not only revolutionized the movie industry, but it also changed what the public would accept from movies. You gotta remember that when this thing first came out back in 1933, the people thought they were actually seeing a real 24-foot tall gorilla tramping around New York City. Admittedly, folks were a bit more naive back then, and they had were not used to special effects of this caliber. I mean, the effects by Willis H. O'Brien are so good that they still stand up today. Interestingly, Jackson's crew decided that they would try to recreate a missing scene from the original movie using the exact same methods that O'Brien employed in 1933. Jackson's team couldn't believe how difficult it was to create these effects, how much time went into them, and how much they cost to do. But those old effects are wonderful. Take the fight between Kong and the T-Rex. It is unbelievable. The way both Kong and Rex move, and the gore as Kong rips Rex's head apart. Then there was the famous scene on the log bridge, where Kong shakes all of the men off and they fall to their deaths in the gorge below. I'm still amazed at the level of detail and realism when I watch this today. All of the jungle scenes in this film are incredible. They used mattes and cutouts to give the jungle a depth that you don't acheive with a few potted plants and a cyclorama.

As I pointed out above, I'm not comparing the 1933 King Kong to the remakes because the original film stands alone. It is without peer. Made just five years after Al Jolson made talking films the standard, Merian C. Cooper and Willis H. O'Brien created a masterpiece of cinematography. They pushed the boundaries of what could be done in film and paved the way for the likes of George Pal, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and John Carpenter. King Kong has a wonderful look to it. The velvety black and white images lend the film a dreamlike quality, though many would say it's a nightmare rather than a dream. The acting is a little bit wooden, but then, you must remember that we're only five short years away from the silent era, with it's highly stylized acting. All things considered, the actors do a pretty good job. But of course, the star of the show is Kong, the 18" model gorilla. Amazingly, that little model wins our hearts in the end. We feel for him, root for him, and are sad when he finally falls. It's telling when a movie can produce that much pathos from an audience. If you need more proof of King Kong's worth as a movie, you need only remember that we're still watching and talking about it 78 years after it first premiered. It takes a mighty big movie to last that long. King Kong is about as big as they come.

King Kong is rated G and is filmed in black and white.

The Mummy (1932)

I cannot, today, begin to adequately describe to anyone the terror and the thrill I felt when I saw Karl Freund's The Mummy for the first time. I was ten years old. Spending the night at my cousins house in southwestern New York State. Dairy country, ya know. We made popcorn and fudge, and had staked out positions around my uncle's living room, because the Friday Night Creature Feature was coming on at 10:30 PM. There we sat in that darkened room as the mummy of Im-ho-tep, majestically played by Boris Karloff, came to life, his bandage-clad hand reaching out to take the sacred scroll that reanimated him, while the poor young anthropologist goes stark staring mad. The shivers that ran up and down my spine as Im-ho-tep, disguised as modern-day Egyptian Ardath Bey explains how Im-ho-tep was buried alive to Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), the modern-day reincarnation of his ancient lover, Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. I had nightmares about being buried alive for months afterwards. There was the incredible tension as Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan) and Frank Whemple (David Manners) race to save Helen from the clutches of the evil Im-ho-tep. And who could forget that last shot of Im-ho-tep's decaying corpse with half of the skull collapsed. *shudder* This was the stuff that fired little boys' imaginations back in 1970. Watching this movie, I dreamed of going to Egypt, wearing a pith helmet, digging for long-buried Egyptian cities.

The Mummy was produced by Carl Leammle, Jr. The son of Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle, Carl, Jr. was responsible for turning Universal into the horror movie studio and for raising horror movies to the level of art. He was responsible for such classic films as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Old Dark House, and many more. It's safe to say that without him, horror movies would never have become the important genre that they are today, and names like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi would be little more than footnotes in movie history. Karl Freund began his career as a cinematographer working on German expressionist films of the 1920s. He directed Lugosi in the 1931 classic Dracula, before turning his hand to The Mummy. Freund is responsible for making Universal's monsters tragic figures instead of simply frightening ghouls. Dracula and Im-ho-tep, under Freund's direction, are sympathetic characters, lonely old men who long to have someone to share their immortality with them. Sure, we're frightened of them, but we also feel for them. In their isolation, Freund's monsters are the ultimate Others, outsiders who will never be allowed admittance into the club, sub-humans who will always be driven out and killed.

Boris Karloff had been making movies since 1919, but it was Frankenstein in 1931 that made him famous. Still, he didn't often get to speak. In The Mummy, he finally does, and his voice is mesmerizing. It would become iconic apart from the man behind it. Everyone knows that Frankenstein sounds like Karloff, just as everyone knows that vampires sound like Lugosi. Edward Van Sloan had also been around Hollywood for quite some time, and had already made appearances in Frankenstein and Dracula. Sloan was the go-to guy in the 1930s for the slightly eccentric scientist who apparently got his PhD in monsterology. Zita Johann only made eight movies during her life, the last one being a low-budget horror flick in 1983. But she did a lot of theater work over the years, and starred with John Houseman (to whom she was once married) and Orson Welles. She brings to The Mummy a freshness and beauty to stand in stark contrast with Karloff's dusty, crackly makeup. If Karloff is Death, Johann is Rebirth. The rest of the actors are all merely types, set there to help move the plot forward. As such, though, they do a very good job.

Many people, when watching The Mummy and other films of this time period, comment on how very stylized the acting appears. But one must remember that these movies came only a couple of years after talking pictures came into being. In silent films, actors had to convey everything they were feeling through body movements and facial gestures. Everything had to be exaggerated. It took Hollywood a few years to break out of that mindset. If you can look beyond that - or even learn to love it as I do - you will see what a visually stunning film this is. The velvety black and white photography lends it a distance that only adds to the mystique of the story. It happened "back then" the film seems to say, when magical things were still possible, even if only just. And all of the special effects are done without computers. This was true movie-making genius.

The Mummy is rated G and is filmed in black and white. Colorized versions are not permitted.

Apollo 18 (2011)

Let's call it The Blair Witch Meets Alien on the Moon. That just about sums up everything you need to know about this low-budget stinker from the Weinstein Brothers. Here's the premise. There were actually 18 Apollo missions, not 17. Recently declassified film footage from 1972 reveals that Apollo 18 was a top secret mission designed to do...something. I think they were placing some transmitter doo-hickeys on the moon to monitor something or other. Once on the moon, though, our intrepid astroboys are attacked by...um...rocks...I think. Or was it strange crab-like creatures? Or was it rocks that turn into crab-like creatures? Or was it the alien? After all, one of the rocks did insert itself into Lloyd Owen, turning him into a goggle-eyed maniac. So maybe it was the alien. Or something else. If I sound unsure of myself, that's because the movie never really seemed to make it clear just what the alien was or what it had against the friendly, visiting delegates from Earth. Well, anyway, Lloyd and fellow moonwalker Ryan Robbins discover a Soviet moonlander. It's abandoned, but otherwise fairly intact. Nearby, in a dark and spooky crater lit only by the strobes of Ryan's camera flash (we spent all that money to send men to the moon, but we forgot to give them flashlights?) they find the corpse of the cosmonaut. Decayed. The movie never gets around to explaining how he decayed in an airless, sub-zero environment, so just work with me here, okay? He's all decayed. Soon after Lloyd starts showing the effects of his own contamination. It's the usual stuff - rapid movement, bulging eyes, wild ranting. After trying to trash the lander, Lloyd escapes and runs off into the night. Ryan tries to follow him into yet another dark and spooky crater, where he is assaulted by crab-like creatures. He escapes, makes his way to the Soviet lander and takes off, only to find that the Soviet lander is full of rocks...that turn into crab-like creatures... and eat him. Of course, everyone dies in the end which presents one slight continuity problem. If the astroboys are filming everything on these handheld cameras that take film cartridges, and they are all killed on the moon, and no one else ever went back to the moon, then how did the film cartridges end up in the super top secret vault at NASA? Oh, but film makers hate people like me. At any rate, as I have already pointed out, Apollo 18 purports to be recently discovered film footage from 1972, and at that, at least, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego did a very good job of recreating the look of NASA film stock. That both helps and hinders the film. Remember when Neil Armstrong stepped onto Lunar soil for the first time? Remember how fuzzy everything was, as Neil's form, almost a palimpsest of a human being, moved around the Lunar landscape, dragging ghosts of his own image about with him? Okay, now imagine watching a whole movie that was done just like that, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this movie was like. That and the whole shaky-shaky camera thing gets a little tiresome after a while. I'd have much preferred straight, old-fashioned camera work to this "I gotta camera and I'm gonna film everything I see" garbage. Finally, I found that the astroboys lost their cool extraordinarily fast. I mean, these are guys who are trained for years to keep their cool under any situation, yet they practically fly to pieces at the first corpse they come across. I would expect cooler heads on the moon. After all, it was only one corpse. Still, I suppose that some will find Apollo 18 entertaining. Some may even find it scary. It just failed to scare or entertain me.

Apollo 18 is rated PG-13 and is filmed in grainy, shaky color.

The Innocents (1961)

Jack Clayton's The Innocents is a wonderful Gothic horror story, the likes of which we seldom see in our day of CGI ghosts and ghouls. Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is hired by a wealthy gentleman (Michael Redgrave) to serve as the governess of his young niece Flora (Pamela Franklin) and nephew Miles (Martin Stephens). The uncle gives Miss Giddens complete authority to deal with any problem, telling her that she must never bother him under any circumstances. Miss Giddens arrives at the country estate where the children live and meets Flora, who appears to be a sweet little girl. Soon after her arrival, Miles arrives, having been expelled from boarding school. Seems he corrupted the other boys. Nothing more is said. The housekeeper, kindly old Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins), can't believe it. She maintains that Miles and Flora are innocents. Miss Giddens isn't so sure. She becomes obsessed with the former governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop). There's some dark secret surrounding her. Miss Giddens pries it out of Mrs. Grose. Seems there was a valet who ran the estate. Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde) was a cruel and domineering man. Miss Jessel was devoted to him. Turns out, so was Miles. Quint treated Miss Jessel like his slave. Used her for whatever he wanted. Wherever he wanted. No matter who was watching. Right in front of Miles and Flora. They got an early education in things they should never have known. Then Quint died in an accident. Miles was distraught. So was Miss Jessel. After pining away for several months she drowned herself in the lake. Trouble is, as in all good Gothic horror stories, the dead don't stay in their graves. Quint's and Miss Jessel's hunger and desire drive their spirits to use Flora and Miles to fulfill their beastly desires. Miss Giddens is determined to stop this, to save the children, at any cost. The price turns out to be higher than she imagined.

The Innocents is not just another ghost story though. It deals with some subjects that were simply not dealt with in movies in 1961. Sexual perversion. Domination and submission. Child abuse. These things aren't talked about outright. You couldn't do that in 1961. Instead, they're hinted at. Alluded to. Suggested. It's not hard to miss the implications and allusions. These children were enthralled to a man who abused them, who abused their governess, who still cannot let them go. His hold on their young minds extends beyond the grave. But is it a real ghost? Or is it all in the mind of Miss Giddens. Mrs. Grose claims she doesn't see the ghosts, even when Miss Giddens is looking straight at them. Flora and Miles deny the presence of ghosts too, but they would. This calls into question Miss Giddens' sanity. Has she taken the stories told to her by Mrs. Grose and created in her own mind something that did not exist? Has she summoned up the ghosts from her own self-conscience? Does her insistence that the children face their demons cause them more damage by forcing them to relive again the horrors they endured while Quint and Miss Jessel were alive and rampaging through the house? None of these questions are answered in the film. The audience is left to draw their own conclusions. Three possibilities exist: 1) the children were abused and there are ghosts trying to possess them; 2) the children were abused and Miss Giddins thinks the Quint's and Miss Jessel's influence over the children are ghosts trying to possess them; 3) the cheese done slipped off Miss Giddins' cracker. In any case, it all makes for one mighty good story, with a few hair raising moments.

The Innocents was adapted from William Archibald's 1950 Broadway play of the same title, which was in turn adapted from Henry James' novella, "The Turn of the Screw." The movie is filmed in starkly contrasted black and white, with plenty of deep, deep shadows where anything could be lurking. The country estate house is expansive, and the film is shot in wide screen, but Clayton fills the scenes with darkness, crowding the actors, hemming them in and creating that wonderfully claustrophobic atmosphere that every good horror movie needs. Interestingly, most of the images of the "ghosts" appear not at night in darkened hallways, but in broad daylight, standing atop a tower, standing in the middle of a lake, sitting at a school desk. The juxtaposition of the dead under the bright sunlight lends a creepiness that would not exist had they appeared out of the shadows. Quint's ghost also appears at night in the window, leering, smirking, laughing, mocking Miss Giddens' attempts to pry the children out of his grasp. Then there are the voices and the laughing that Miss Giddens hears at night. Or does she hear them? No one else seems to. Not even Mrs. Grose. All of this combines to create a wonderful ghost story or a great psychological thriller, or both. It's hard to say. But I'll guarantee that it'll send a chill or two up your spine.

The Innocents is unrated, but I'd rate it PG on account of mature subject matter and disturbing scenes.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)

Freddie Francis' 1965 Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is a first-rate example of a British portmanteau horror film. The film revolves around five men travelling in a train compartment. They make room for a sixth man, Dr. Schrek (Peter Cushing), who can read people's futures through the a deck of tarot cards, which he calls his House of Horrors. One by one, each of the men have their futures foretold, all of which end in death. Of the five tales, my personal favorites are "The Killing Vine," in which a family returns from vacation only to find a truly invasive vine taking over their garden, and "The Disembodied Hand," with Christopher Lee as an art critic terrorized by the severed hand of an artist that he ran over, causing him to lose his rather vengeful hand. Also of note is "The Vampire Story," starring Donald Sutherland as a young doctor who unwittingly marries a beautiful French vampire. The other two stories are, in my book, only mildly entertaining. In "The Werewolf Story," a real estate agent is called back to his family's estate where the current owners have a rather nasty surprise in store for him, and "The Voodoo Story" tells the tale of a jazz musician who rips off an ancient voodoo hymn with disastrous results for himself. But what are truly the best parts of the entire movie are the scenes in the railway coach. There's real atmosphere here. The train is travelling by night, so all you can see out the windows is blackness and smoke. The scenes are claustrophobic. And Peter Cushing plays the evil Dr. Schrek with just the right combination of mildness and menace.

Let me tell you straight up that this is not a great movie. Come to think of it, few horror movies are "great." But some of them are great fun. This is one of those. The casting is unbelievable. Hollywood would pay a fortune to get all of these men back in front of the camera for a second go around. And they play their parts well, each of them starting off jovial and non-chalant, each ending up fearful. The sets are not bad, and the special effects are good considering the time period and the budget. The five short stories are pretty good, even if they have plot holes in them. All in all, this is what I would call a good movie, if I use Roger Ebert's definition, which is that a good movie does what it sets out to do. Dr. Terror's House of Horrors sets out to entertain us and, maybe, give us a tingle. It accomplishes that quite well, and so it is a good movie. Could it have been better? Of course, but the same can be said for many movies. This happens to be the first horror movie I ever saw. I was five years old at the time and living in Germany with my family. My mother and my aunt decided they wanted to see it, so they went and took us kids with them. I was probably scared witless at the time, though I don't really recall. But I did recall the images from the film. They stuck with me for the rest of my life. So much so, that I sought out this film. You could say that it formed the basis for my love of horror films. Not gorefests, but real, old-fashioned horror films. This is just such a movie. Check it out if you're ever in the mood for some good, old-fashioned entertainment.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is unrated. It's not available on DVD. Hopefully, somebody will restore it and issue it on DVD soon. Until then, you can only get it on fuzzy VHS or through NetFlix.

I Am Legend (2007), The Omega Man (1971), The Last Man on Earth (1964)

How about three movies for the price of one? Why not? After all, they are all the same movie. The plot goes something like this: Earth is ravaged by a terrible plague that kills most of the planet's inhabitants. Those it doesn't kill, it turns into flesh-eating zombies who fear the sunlight. Only one man is immune to the plague - a doctor who struggles to find a cure for those who are already zombified. He lives in a fortified house to keep the zombies from eating him before he can come up with a cure for this dreadful disease. Eventually, he meets a young woman who appears to be immune also. They get real friendly, on account of the fact that neither of them has seen another human for a long time. Just as the doctor is completing his research, the zombies attack. He's killed in the attack, but not before he gives the serum that will cure humanity to the young woman and she escapes to the only known colony of uninfected humans. That's the story in a nutshell, but it's was good enough to persuade the powers that be in Hollywood to make it not once, but three times (well, four really, but the forth one is so bad that it's not worth mentioning here).

Vincent Price played the roll of Dr. Robert Morgan in Ubaldo Ragona's The Last Man on Earth, filmed in and around Eur, Rome. This version of the film is tame, almost laughably so, by today's standards, as the slow-moving zombies bump into the good doctor's house chanting his name. Not much scare there. Yet, the scene where Dr. Morgan tosses the dead bodies into the city dump and lights them on fire was considered so disturbing in 1967 that it was cut from the American release of the film. Boris Sagal's 1971 film The Omega Man stars Charlton Heston as Dr. Robert Neville, the lone survivor charging around LA, blasting zombies, while he searches for a cure in his fortified townhouse. This version is really the classic of the three, and a movie that cannot be much improved upon, except maybe for some better zombie makeup. And in 2007, Francis Lawrence gave us I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, who spends his day cruising the streets of New York City with his dog Sam, looking for mutants and his nights in his fortified townhouse looking for a cure. Here the zombies have gone completely animal on us. They no longer think, they simply act aggressively, except perhaps for the leader who holds a slight grudge against Dr. Neville. But even he's only marginally smarter than the rest of the snarling, slobbering brood.

So why three versions of the same story? Cuz the folks in Hollywood don't have a lot of imagination, so they just keep rehashing the same stories again and again. All three movies are adaptations of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. The Last Man on Earth is, however, not that great, and begged for a remake. It was a low budget film, shot in Italy, with bad make-up on grainy black and white film. Let's face it, brain-eating zombies didn't look all that menacing in movies back in the 1950s and 60s. They usually just put a lot of white pancake on the actors' faces, added a whole bunch of eyeliner, mussed up their hair and put them in shabby clothes. The Omega Man is the best of the lot. Its zombies are really just folks who've been turned into light-sensitive albinos by the plague, and they have it out for old Chuck cuz he's the one they think is responsible for it. These zombies are smart, they're organized, they have weapons, and they have a plan. Also, by 1971, Hollywood had become a little more aware of America's ethnic makeup, and the survivors - zombie and otherwise - were both black and white. This film was pretty radical for its time in that Lisa (Rosalind Cash), the uninfected woman who Heston's character gets jiggy with, is black. By 2007, Hollywood is definitely integrated, at least in the SciFi realm. In I Am Legend, Dr. Neville is played by a black man and Anna (Alice Braga) - the uninfected woman he finds - is played by an Hispanic, making it a much better representation of New York society. Special effects have also gotten more sophisticated (notice I didn't say better). The zombie hoards that Will Smith must contend with are computer animated monsters that move at lightning speed and possess near-superhuman strength. Sucks to fight zombies in the 21st Century, dude.

The Last Man in the World is rated G and is filmed in black and white.

The Omega Man is rated PG and is filmed in color.

I Am Legend is rated PG13 and is filmed in color.

One can only assume that the next version will be rated R and will be filmed in 3D. Oh the horror!

The Uninvited (1944)

Lewis Allen's The Uninvited is one of the best little horror stories ever filmed, and a movie that you'll be lucky if you ever get to see. Like Under the Tuscan Sun, it involves an old deserted estate, and the dream someone has of fixing it up and starting a new life in the country far from the strife of the city. There the similarity ends, however. Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) discover Windwood Manor, a beautiful old mansion sitting empty on the sea coast. This brother and sister duo decide to purchase the home immediately and make it their own. Only one problem. The house isn't quite as deserted as they thought it was. Two women died there in less than fortunate circumstances. One is Mary Meredith, cold-hearted wife of the artist Llewellyn Meredith. The other is his model, Carmel Casada. As Roderick and Pamela try to unravel the mystery of these two ghosts - the former cold and threatening, the latter sad and weeping - Roderick falls in love with Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), the daughter of Llewellyn. Stella is also the granddaughter of the man who sold them the house, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp). He forbids Stella from seeing Roderick or going near Windwood Manor, much to the dismay of the young lovers. When Stella does finally show up there, she's at first filled with intense happiness as she smells the fragrance of mimosa. Later, she's scared out of her wits by the cold, angry spirit. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, Roderick, Pamela, and Dr. Scott (Allan Napier) go to see Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), who was a dear friend of Meredith's. Eventually, the trio solves the mystery and exorcises all of the spirits from Windwood Manor for good. Roderick and Stella will be married, as will Dr. Scott and Pamella.

The Uninvited is a wonderful old spine tingler, a tale of an angry presence that threatens the life of a sweet young woman and a beneficent presence that seeks to check the other. It's a story of love and revenge, of hatred and control, of repressed emotions and lesbianism. Yes, you read that correctly. Like Rebecca, there's a strongly hinted relationship between the cold Mary Meredith and the creepy Miss Holloway. Of course, such things could never be said outright back in the forties, so they had to be implied. This film implies quite a lot, enough to say that something more was going on between these two twisted women. I say "twisted," because that is the only was that homosexuality and lesbianism could be shown back in 1944. If a character's gender preference was called into question, they were by default evil. It's just the way it was. Like all of the really good suspense stories of the forties, it's shot in a deliciously moody style, with lots of deep shadows, even during the daylight hours. Windwood Manor is a creepy old pile of bricks, with its long, winding staircase and the reflections from the ocean cast onto the walls and ceiling, much like in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. There are some wonderfully funny scenes when Roderick takes Stella sailing and promptly gets sick, and when Roderick and Pamela visit the sanitarium of Miss Holloway. Like Cruella deVille, "if she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will." Finally, there's the ghost itself. Mary Meredith's disembodied presence was rendered with a wonderful special effect that revealed only enough of her spirit to scare you, but not enough of it to let you "see the strings." I've seen this movie a dozen times, and I still get shivers up and down my spine when that ghost appears on screen. That's how well it was done.

The Uninvited is rated G and is available in creepy black and white. It's only available in this country on VHS. This wonderful thriller has never been released on DVD in the United States. Why? I dunno. You'll have to ask Paramount about that one.

Frankenstein (1931)

James Whale's 1931 masterpiece Frankenstein is another of those great, old movies, like Dracula, which has become so deeply ingrained into our society that I doubt there isn't a single person in this country who does not recognize the the film's iconic images. The star of Frankenstein's - Boris Karloff with his flat-top head and the bolts protruding from his neck - is easily one of the most recognizable figures in all of American popular culture. And yet, like Bela Lugosi's iconic film, very few people in this country have ever actually seen the original film version of this timeless story. In this regard, the 1931 Frankenstein is much like Herman Melville's Moby Dick - everybody knows what's it's about, but almost no one has actually read it (yes, in fact, I have). And that's really too bad too, because it's such a good movie. And it's the start of so much. The icon that a thousand other images were built on. It's not only a masterpiece; it's the master. The model. The mold for all that followed it, from the Hammer films of the sixties, to Andy Warhol's travesty, to Frankenberry. They all owe their existence to this film. Not to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly's novel of the same name. She never explains how the monster is made, and her monster is a very well-spoken creature, even though he learned to speak by listening to peasants. No, the images of the brooding, grunting, monster, the bolts of electricity coursing into the monster, bringing it to life, the ancient castles and tiny villages that resemble nothing in the real world, old or new, all of this comes to us directly from the mind of James Whale.

It all starts in a graveyard. The image of death brooding over the scene. Mourners filing away from the graveside. Two men appear. They rush to the fresh grave and start digging furiously. Next you see them cutting down the corpse of a criminal who was hanged on the highroad. You know who they are. Don't need me to fill you in on that one. It's Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and...no, not Igor...Fritz (Dwight Frye). Yeah, I know, Fritz kind of loses something in the translation doesn't it. Anyway, they get the body all sewed together, then Fritz is sent after a brain. Remember that wonderful scene in Young Frankenstein when Igor goes and steals the wrong brain? Mel Brooks copied that scene almost frame for frame from Whale's movie. Fritz gets the wrong brain. Dr. Frankenstein puts it into his creation. The rest, as they say, is movie history. The electrical storm comes. The lightning flashes. The machines are started up. Electricity flashes through the old watchtower. The monster lives. But he's not controllable. He's a mad man. He kills Fritz. Granted, Fritz had it coming to him. Tormented the poor creature constantly. Still, they'll have to destroy him. Victor's old teacher, Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), will do the deed. But the monster's no dummy. He knows what's up. As Waldman prepares to destroy the monster, the monster kills him. Then he escapes. Who wouldn't. He kills a little girl by accident. Seems she didn't float as well as the flowers did. What a tragedy. The angry villagers go after the monster. Pitchforks and torches. We all know the scene. Victor finds him, and they struggle. The monster drags Victor into an old windmill, where they continue to fight. In the end, the monster throws Victor from the top of the windmill. The townspeople burn down the windmill and the monster is destroyed. At least until the sequel.

Frankenstein was filmed in black and white, obviously, on these wonderful sets that evoke the German expressionism of a decade earlier. Notice the wonderful watchtower with its angled stairway, its leaning walls, its crooked windows. The monster makeup by Jack P. Pierce has become so iconic that when you say the word Frankenstein, most people immediately picture Pierce's flat-topped, yellow skinned creation. The electrical equipment was designed by Ken Strickfaden, who doubled for Karloff while the electricity was playing about the monster's body. Yeah, they used a live person, not a dummy. This machinery is so tightly linked to the Frankenstein image that Mel Brooks used all of the same equipment - not reproductions but the very same pieces - in his spoof of Whale's film. Many of the shots and camera angles used in the film were cutting edge for their time, and later they became standard stuff. One of Whale's favorite camera techniques was to flow the action through walls, so he built his set so the camera could easily track the actors as they passed from one room to another. Sounds old-fashioned now. Then, it was state of the art stuff. Put all of this together, and you have one of the greatest movies that has ever come out of Hollywood. There have been lots of remakes and homages. Now of them can beat the original. Watch it yourself and find out.

Frankenstein is rated G, and is available in luscious black and white.

The City of Lost Children (1995)

One (Ron Perlman) is a Russian whale hunter. Well, used to be. He can't do it anymore. Now he performs as a circus strong man. Breaks chains. That sort of thing. Denree (Joseph Luien) is his adopted little brother. All he does is eat. One night, someone stabs their manager. As they watch over their wounded friend, a group of strange men, each with one mechanical eye, attack them and steal Denree. One sets out in search of him through the twisting streets and alleyways of Marc Callo's and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children. Along the way, One meets Miette (Judith Vittet), a young orphan girl who agrees to help One finds his little brother. But their quest is not an easy one. There is danger everywhere. They are chased by the governess of the orphanage where Miette used to live, the evil Siamese twins, la Pieuvre (Genvieve Brunet and Odile Mallet) who use their wards to steal for them. They employ Marcello (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) who uses a trained flea and a secret serum to drive people into homicidal rages. The flea triggers one of the most wonderful chain-of-event sequences that I have ever seen in any movie. It's right out of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Anyway, One and Miette discover that Danree has been kidnapped by a secret group called the Cyclopes, blind men who have mechanical eyes installed in their heads. They kidnap children for the mysterious Krank (Daniel Amilfork), who can no longer dream, and so he exists on the dreams of children. One and Miette invade Krank's lair on an abandoned oil rig, rescue Danree and all of the other children, and leave as the rig is demolished by Krank's half-crazed father.

Okay, I'm gonna warn you right now. The City of Lost Children is not to everyone's taste. It's a quirky film whose plot mirrors the labyrinthine streets of the city in which it is set. But I love this movie. It's a visual feast, full of color, shadows, and textures. The sets are unbelievable. They're almost like a cartoon of reality, yet they're real sets, not computer animated fabrications, like in Sky Captain. Every scene is packed with crumbling brick and weathered wood, rain-slick cobble stones, rusted steel. It begs to be touched. You feel this movie more than watch it. You watch it more than listen to it. You listen because you cannot help yourself. The haunting musical score pulls you into this 1930s French port city, and you go along following the clues that will lead One and Miette back to Danree. I also love the relationship that forms between One and Miette, as he grows to care for this little girl who's on the cusp of adolescence. He carries her around when her shoes wear out, massages her feet when they get sore, warms her up when she gets cold. Don't go thinking bad thoughts now. It's all innocent. One may be over six feet tall and strong as an ox, but mentally he's a child himself. Miette takes care of him, just as much as he takes care of her. In the end, you know that One, Miette and Denree will be a happy family.

The City of Lost Children is rated R, and this gives me a great opportunity to rant and rave about the rating system in this country. There is absolutely no reason to give this film an R rating. There is no sex, and the only profanity used in the film is a word that every child over the age of ten has heard many times over. Yes, there is violence and some disturbing imagery, but it's far less than appeared in the PG-13 rated Lord of the Rings movies. My personal opinion is that the R rating was punitive, meant to reduce the number of teenagers who might otherwise have seen and enjoyed this exquisite French movie. Why this should be, I do not know. I only know that the R rating is completely undeserved.

Dracula (1931)

Dracula! The very name inspires hundreds of images in people's minds, everything from Bela Lugosi to Count Chocula. But with the release of the third movie in the Twilight series, I thought I'd take a look back to where it all started, back to the original Dracula, back to Todd Browning's 1931 masterpiece starring Lugosi as the ancient, blood-thirsty and tragic vampire. And tragic is the concept I want to focus on here, because that is the thing that most of the remakes and knock-offs and other variations of the story always fail to capture. The original 1931 Dracula was a tragedy in that Dracula himself was a truly tragic figure and Browning was sympathetic to his tragic nature. After all, here is a man who is cursed to never see the light of day, a man who lives out a life devoid of friends because friendship with him brings the risk of becoming like him, a man who is despised and hunted because of his difference. It is Dracula's difference - his otherness - that makes him such a tragic figure. It also makes him an early symbol of all the Others who have ever existed in our society, from black Americans to AIDS victims to Muslims. Dracula serves as a metaphor for all of them.

The story is familiar to just about everyone by now. Dracula moves from his crumbling castle in Transylvania to London, where he meets the beautiful Mina (Helen Chandler). He immediately sets about seducing her, to the dismay of her fiance' Jonathan Harker (David Manners) and her father Doctor Seward (Herbert Bunston). Dracula is assisted at times by his minion Renfield (Dwight Frye), a man who has gone insane in Dracula's service. As Mina starts succumbing to Dracula's powers, Seward calls on Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) for help. Van Helsing immediately recognizes what Dracula is, and casts him out of the house. When Dracula kidnaps Mina, Van Helsing, Harker and Seward pursue him to his castle where they drive a stake through his heart, killing him and releasing Mina from his power.

Of course, this tells you very little about Todd Browning's film. Many younger people may be disappointed by the film, because it doesn't contain a lot of the things we've come to associate with vampire movies. For instance, you won't see any nudity, sex, violence or blood. That's right. In the original film, the only blood seen is when Renfield pokes his finger on a paper clip. Even the slaying of Dracula himself takes place off camera. Instead, Browning relies on atmosphere. There are ancient castles and creepy forests, men in dark suits and women in gossamer night gowns walking zombie-like through misty darkness, cobwebs and shadows, tension and suspense. The sets are elaborate, and the special effects are minimal - there's no CGI morphing, no impossible stunts. The musical score, composed specifically for this movie and performed by the Kronos Quartet, is appropriately melancholic. The acting may seem stiff to people today, but it must be remembered that since talking movies had only been around for four years, movies in 1931 still retained a lot of the staging of silent films. But Lugosi's delivery is perfect as he invites Renfield to "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make."

Modern vampire films may be flashy, sexy, fast-paced, CGI-laden, gore fests, but they still can't compete with the original Dracula. It set the standard by which all subsequent vampire films have been measured ever since. Check it out some time, if you dare.

Dracula is rated G and is available in gloriously restored black and white.