Son of Frankenstein was also pretty good, though it wasn't as elaborate a production as the first two. The cast is excellent. Basil Rathbone is a bit stiff and overacted as Wolf von Frankenstein, but effective. Lionel Atwill is terrific as the Inspector, arguably the real hero of the film. And as the real villain, Ygor, Bela Lugosi creates one of his greatest characterizations, really well-done. ("Because I stole bodies. ...They said.") It's disappointing, though, that the Monster is back to being mute, and that he isn't really his own man, more just a servant of Ygor. He has his empathetic moments, but not many, and he's more of a cold-blooded assassin this time, when before he killed either by accident or in the heat of anger and fear. It's a darker turn for the character. (Also, the furry coat is an odd look.) Once again, there are some significant continuity changes between films. The set design of the Frankenstein home is completely different, bordering on the surrealist, and the laboratory is retconned from a watchtower some distance away in the hills -- and completely demolished and burned in Bride -- to a dome over a sulfur pit right on the castle's grounds. And the electrical equipment is much more simple and less impressive this time around. (There are some impressive storm and lightning effects outside the windows in the early scenes, though. It looked to me like the lightning bolts were being projected onto a cloudy backdrop behind the windows. The whole thing could've been a rear-projected animation, but then I think it would've had a flicker or grain that I didn't see.) These movies remind me how common it was in the past to approach continuity in ongoing series quite loosely and not hesitate to alter things when convenient, in contrast to our modern fan culture that's obsessed with exact continuity details. This is also the first movie to establish the Monster's immortality, an idea that would be essential to the Japanese Frankenstein duology from Toho (Frankenstein vs. Baragon, aka Frankenstein Conquers the World, and Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira, aka War of the Gargantuas). An interestingly metatextual bit: In his first scene, Wolf complained about how 9 out of 10 people actually referred to the creature as Frankenstein. Since nobody in the movie actually did so, that was a clear commentary by the filmmakers on the way the general public tended to call him that.
On the naming thing, Universal itself perpetuated the confusion with their own movie titles. SON OF FRANKENSTEIN clearly refers to the doctor's son since the Monster has no offspring, but does anybody really think THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN refers to Valerie Hobson as the doctor's lovely spouse? Of course not. The Bride of Frankenstein is the female creature played by Elsa Lanchester. And things don't get any more consistent as the series continues. GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, the next movie, refers to the ghost of the doctor, who manifests long enough to justify the title, but the title of the subsequent film, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN, is back to referring to the Monster as "Frankenstein" again. (Spoiler alert! The movies does NOT end with a massive battle between the Wolfman and Dr. Frankenstein.)
I watched Ghost of Frankenstein this afternoon. At first it seems like a pretty direct continuation from Son, picking up pretty directly from the previous film's continuity -- except that the castle has changed design again, the laboratory is now suddenly inside the castle instead of out back, and the actor who played the first town council member the Monster killed onscreen in Son was right back on the council in the same seat and the same costume. But there are some odd discrepancies later. Ygor refers to Ludwig Frankenstein as Henry's "second son," but he's far older than Wolf, old enough to have an adult daughter, who coincidentally has the same name as Wolf's wife, Elsa. (Some parts of this felt like it was written for Wolf and his wife but changed to Ludwig and his daughter when Basil Rathbone didn't return.) I found Lon Chaney, Jr.'s turn as the Monster disappointing. Karloff brought emotion and personality to the role even without speaking, but Chaney was just going through the motions without expression, and completely silently as well. And Lionel Atwill wasn't as effective as the villainous doctor as he'd been as the inspector in the previous film. (I wonder, if any studio executive had ever decided to terminate Lionel's contract, did they order their subordinates to "fire Atwill"?) We also had much more scaled-down electrical equipment this time, though I think it's the same stuff they used in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein some years later. They're continuing the "friend to children" thing with the Monster. I love it that the monster wanted to become a little girl. How genderfluid of him!
I was going to move on to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but apparently it's more a sequel to The Wolf Man than to The Ghost of Frankenstein, and TCM doesn't show The Wolf Man until the 29th. So I guess I'll wait until then. Interesting that they did actual crossover movies, one film as a sequel to two others simultaneously. Real cinematic-universe stuff. So instead, I watched a couple of other films I recorded, neither of which held my attention enough for me to watch in one sitting. One was the silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which kind of bored me; as with the silent Sherlock Holmes, I don't think drama works as well in silent form as slapstick comedy. Also, the movie was quite nebulous about Hyde's alleged debaucheries. Like, he went to an opium den and just walked around looking at people instead of actually using opium, and for a moment it looked like he was taking a couple of women for a threesome, but then just made them look at themselves in a mirror and walked away. Huh? I thought the Spencer Tracy version was too sanitized... Also, the music track added for the 2004 edition was in a discordant style that I found most unpleasant. I watched most of it with the sound muted. I also watched George Pal's Atlantis, The Lost Continent, which had some interesting bits, but was one of his lesser films overall. It had a cutely clunky stop-motion animated opening with Paul Frees' booming voice expositing the theory that the "similar" cultures of Eurasia and the Americas all came from Atlantis, and then was mostly a story about a Greek fisherman finding a stranded Atlantean princess, the two falling in love with each other and going back to Atlantis, the fisherman being enslaved by the Atlanteans and blaming the princess, and so until the continent finally blew up. Edward Platt (the Chief from Get Smart) plays a kindly, proto-Christian priest who rejects Atlantis's false gods and its warmongering and slavery and predicts that the one true God will strike them down. There's a weird side thread about an Atlantean Dr. Moreau changing slaves into beast-men, but it doesn't really go anywhere. And the hero is kind of bland and petulant. The effects aren't bad, though there's a lot of stock footage from earlier movies in the climactic disaster sequence. And interestingly, the actors playing both the lead characters' fathers have their voices dubbed by Paul Frees. The fisherman's father sounds a lot like Boris Badenov, although he's my favorite character in the film, taking no guff from the haughty, spoiled princess and putting her in her place. Unfortunately, he's gone by the second act.
I watched as much as I could take of the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies. They are just way too dry and lifeless for me though I did like Ben Mankiewicz having to warn everyone about how they came from less sensitive times.
Oh, another note about Pal's Atlantis: I noticed that some of the action music sounded familiar, and after a moment, I realized I recognized it from Pal's The Time Machine, which was made a year earlier and had the same composer, Russell Garcia. I'm not sure whether it was actually stock music or if Garcia just reused his motifs James Horner-style.
DST ends on Nov. 9. I'm thinking they may run X again that date, and then Outer Space in the extra hour or something.
Watched Atlantis, the Lost Continent and it was really underwhelming, not only was it bland and dull but the plot just meanders. It seems like a lot of these type pictures from before the 70s were this way. Don't know if the washed-out color comes from need of restoration or that's just how they looked. At least it was more watchable than The Golden Arrow. While the unsurvivable "Trial of Fire and Water" turned out less epic than hoped the scene where the hero slowly sets his opponent's head on fire was brutal looking and some nice work. I also finally pulled Zoltan, Hound of Dracula off the DVR queue. While rather dull itself there was some unintended laughs at times. When the devil hounds attack a cabin there's funny looking dog leg props breaking windows that look straight out of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. The police called out to investigate the destroyed cabin with a hole torn through the roof conclude that it might be the work of "canyon dogs". I'm starting to remember how some of these obscure movies got that way.
That was kind of a bizarre sequence, yes. When they released the water and the whole arena filled with steam, and after that when most of the fighting took place underwater, I wondered: why would anyone design a spectator sport so that much of its action was obscured from view? That was just ill-conceived. And the hero's behavior was ill-conceived as well. Generally the heroes in stories like this do the whole "I don't want to fight you, we're fellow slaves, we should join together against our enslavers" thing, but this guy, supposedly the hero of this hyeer pitcher, was totally down with killing a fellow slave.
Well, it was kill or be killed. I remember watching Gamesters of Triskelion as a kid with my cousins and we were like "How's Kirk going to get out of this? You know he's not going to kill these guys." just as he chucks a spear into someone's gut. oops
Yeah, but he didn't even show a hint of remorse about it. And his fighting techniques were pretty brutal. It was hard to sympathize with him as a hero. When he later pretended to sell out to the bad guy and help him conquer the Mediterranean, I figured he was faking, but I would've had no trouble believing it if he'd turned out to be sincerely evil.
Different eras. When I see anime, it is shocking just how cheap life seems. Yet folks feel power over their own lives. In many desparate worlds, you just go with it, like we do with the 1.24 million traffic fatalities every year on this planet. “Where’s the moral outrage?” asks Katherine Kraft, America Walks’ Campaign Director: http://everybodywalk.org/4500-americans-killed-crossing-street-year/ We live in an era where we want to reduce deaths. The Swedes think they can get it to zero. Prying control from the wheel? That's another thing.
The movie was made in 1961. That's a year after Spartacus, which did show its title character as a heroic figure who tried to befriend his fellow slaves rather than just blithely trying to kill them. And it's less than four years before Doctor Who: "The Romans," which also used the trope of the enslaved hero initially refusing to fight a fellow slave when forced into the arena. So it's not because of the era that this film's hero was so callous. It's because the film did a poor job of making its lead sympathetic.
Good news -- TCM did show The X from Outer Space last night, despite my recording of it still being labeled The Outer Space Connection on my DVR. I haven't watched it yet, though. I did watch Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein last night and The Revenge of Frankenstein this morning. I've seen the former before, but not the latter as far as I know. The Hammer films go a different route from Universal by focusing on Victor Frankenstein as the recurring character rather than the monster. Although Victor was a rather villainous character in the first film, killing one person for his work and letting his creature kill his mistress for purely personal reasons. In the sequel, he's presented somewhat more sympathetically, which is a bit odd. Aside from being complicit in the murder of the priest to cover up his own escape, he doesn't do anything deliberately murderous this time, and the deaths that occur are the result of misfortune rather than malice. I guess we could assume he's reformed and been trying to redeem himself, but that isn't addressed. It's interesting, though, that neither film really portrays Frankenstein's work itself as a failure or a menace. The "creatures" become killers due to brain damage as a result of other characters' actions, and there's nothing to refute Frankenstein's claim that they would've turned out perfectly if the procedure had been allowed to play out as intended; indeed, the ending of Revenge seems to prove it conclusively. (Although it didn't explain how Frankenstein was able to create a new body that duplicated his original's face and voice so perfectly. Indeed, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of faking his death?)
Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell was a very dark and cynical movie about plane crash survivors being terrorized by a vampiric body-snatching alien blob, and basically illustrating the worst aspects of human nature in a story that's basically an allegory saying "Oh, war is so awful and we're terrible and we're bringing doom on ourselves and we probably deserve it." Very overacted and over-the-top, pretentious as hell but not good enough to earn its pretention. And I saw its dark twist ending coming a mile away, plus it dragged the ending out way too long and undermined its punch. The X from Outer Space, or Giant Space Monster Guilala, is from the same studio, but more lightweight and aimed at a younger audience. It's practically two different movies -- the first half is a space-travel adventure about a rocket crew trying to get to Mars and fending off a UFO attack, and the second half suddenly turns into a by-the-numbers kaiju film in which a cheesy, Muppety space monster goes on a half-hearted rampage through very cheap miniature cityscapes while the space heroes try to harness a space element as a weapon against the space monster. And all the monster's rampages are accompanied by the same two bars of music looping endlessly, and I'm going to have it stuck in my head all night now. Oh, and the three Caucasian actors in the cast have their lines dubbed into Japanese, and there isn't the slightest effort to even vaguely match their lip sync. Really lame stuff, although the Japanese female lead is really pretty. You'd think a network with "Movie Classics" in its name could drum up some higher-quality movies.