Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite films of all time.  I loved the original which I saw when it first came out in 1978.  The film was supposed to be no one under 17 admitted period, but my mom took me and at 14 I was hooked on Romero’s film.  A few years later the WV Library Commission purchased a 16mm copy for their film library.  I checked it out and was surprised to find a lot of footage that I hadn’t seen before.  I liked this version much better than the original and I spent a huge amount of time trying to track down a copy on VHS.  When the movie came out on DVD, it was released in two versions by Anchor Bay.  I kept trying to figure out which version was the longer one before I bought a copy.  I was also disappointed that the disc was a “flipper” where half the movie is one side of the disc and the rest is on the other side of the disc.  While I debated which one to buy, both discs went out of print.  I eventually bought a couple German edition DVDs before Anchor Bay released the Divimax edition.  They then followed that up with a wonderful box set that contained three different versions of the film.  I purchased both of those.  I also picked up a copy of the original Anchor Bay edition and over the holidays I ordered yet another edition.  That means I have 6 copies of the original Dawn of the Dead (assuming we count the box set as 1 instead of 3).

In 2004 Universal released a remake of Dawn of the Dead.  I missed it on its initial run, but as luck would have it, I was working in Beckley and the film was playing at the $1 theater.  I paid for my ticket and was very impressed.  When the DVD came out, I bought the Widescreen Unrated Director’s Cut with the cardboard slipcover.  This was followed by the R rated version in Full Screen from Wills.  Then I went looking on eBay.  I got the region 2 edition from England, the limited 2 disc version that was released with a bonus disc when the DVD was first released in some locations, and several editions that may be official Asian releases, but may be bootlegs.  I especially love one version I got that lists the rating as PG-13.  It’s almost as good as the copy of American Pie 2 that I got where the box makes the movie sound like a political uprising instead of a teen sex comedy.  The last copy of Dawn of the Dead (2004) I added to my collection was one in Spanish that I found at Big Lots for $3.  That brings my total copies of the remake to 8.

As much as I love the original, I think I love the remake equally well.  I love the cast.  I especially love the cameos by some of the original guys from Dawn; Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini.  Zack Snyder pulled off a rare feat by making such a wonderful film.  When I heard that he was doing Watchmen, I felt sure he would do the movie proud.  I was not let down there either.

Dawn of the Dead is just as exciting watching it for the fourth or fifth time as it was the very first time.  I have to give it 4 stars.  As further proof of my fan love for this movie in both of its incarnations, after my wife and I had been married for about a year and a half, I got a vacation.  We decided to go to Monroeville, PA so that I could visit the Dawn of the Dead shopping mall.  The wife was 7 months pregnant.  I had a cold.  We had no map, but had gotten vague directions from a map that was on the side of a trashcan at her parents’ house.  We were driving a white car in fog that was so thick that truckers were pulling over.  We stopping at a rest area right inside Pennsylvania, and I found a better map.  A short time later we saw the sign “Now entering Monroeville”.  The wife looked at me and asked, “Now, do you think you’ll be able to find the shopping mall?”  No sooner had the words left her mouth than a sign appeared exclaiming, “Entrance Monroeville Shopping Mall”.  I looked back at her and said, “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

The Mummy’s Tomb

The Mummy’s Tomb was the third Universal mummy movie and the second to concern Kharis and the Banning expedition.  This time Lon Chaney Jr. took over the role of Kharis and the action is moved to the USA.  Kharis and a high priest are moved to America where they can take vengeance upon the remaining members of the Banning expedition from The Mummy’s Hand as well as their families.  Kharis begins his revenge by killing Steve Banning the leader of the expedition, once more played by Dick Foran.  He moves on to Steve’s sister and Babe Jenson, who conveniently returns to town when he hears about Banning’s death.  Once more the high priest in charge of Kharis falls in love with a woman and kidnaps her.  This time it is the fiance of Banning’s son, John Banning (John Hubbard).

I definitely recall seeing The Mummy’s Hand as a child, because I remember the ending with Kharis trapped on the balcony of a burning house.  For some reason I always remembered it as a Sorority House.  For the record, it is not.  I really enjoyed watching The Mummy’s Tomb again.  It almost made me want to rewatch The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse just to finally see all five films in the proper order.

I give The Mummy’s Tomb 3 stars.  It was a lot of fun, even if it was a bit repetitive and relied on lots of flashbacks (i.e. stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand).

The Mummy’s Hand

Having worked through the entire Universal Monsters box set, I decided to continue on with the first of the sequels to The Mummy.  After the initial release of the classic Universal Monsters DVD box set, the next round of movies were released on double feature DVDs.  I purchased all of them upon initial release and was very happy that I had when they quickly went out of print.  My biggest disappointment was that no additional double feature DVD releases were planned to finish out the classic Universal Monsters collection.

I had already reviewed the Werewolf of London and She-Wolf of London DVD as well as The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse DVD, so finishing out the mummy movies made perfect sense.  Surprisingly, I also soon found that I may not have previously seen The Mummy’s Hand.  The Mummy’s Hand starts the series of Kharis films with cowboy actor Tom Tyler stepping into the mummy’s bandages this outing.  When I was a kid, for some reason I always assumed that Tom Tyler would have followed Lon Chaney Jr in the role, not the other way around.  So since The Mummy’s Hand had no Lon Chaney Jr. and probably the worst title in the entire series, it was not one of the films that I obsessed about seeing.  And while most of the mummy movies with Kharis have very similar plots, this was the only one to take place in Egypt and it featured the only mummy death scene that didn’t look familiar to me.

The Mummy’s Hand is much better than I had expected it to be without a Chaney mummy.  I enjoyed it quite a bit including the buddy comedy between Dick Foran’s Steve Banning and Wallace Ford’s Babe Jenson.  The Mummy’s Hand did a great job setting up the future sequels.  I give it 3 1/2 stars.

The Phantom Of The Opera (1943)

I saw the silent version of The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney on PBS when I was a kid.  I was waiting for that pivotal scene where Mary Philben removes the mash from the Phantom’s face revealing the disfigured face that I knew from my Aurora model kit.  I had never considered any of the other versions as anything more than pretenders to the throne, and had never watched any of them.  When Universal released the Universal Monsters DVD box set, they chose to include the 1943 version of the Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains.  For some reason my daughter seemed particularly excited to watch this movie, so we popped it in and continued through the box set.

I was a little surprised once again at how little actual screen time the Phantom gets.  We see quite a bit of Erique Claudin (Claude Rains) before he gets disfigured and starts haunting the opera house.  This appears to have been the version that Phantom of the Paradise took its cue from as the original 1925 version features no disfiguring sequence.  Unfortunately, the makeup for the disfigured Phantom was quite a disappointment.  It may have been consistent with the look of a man who had acid thrown in his face, but it was not as interesting as Chaney’s original.  It also seems that the makeup ran further down the actor’s face when his mask was removed than it did when the mask was in place.

The Phantom of the Opera is a fine film, but I was hoping for more menace from the Phantom, and I was hoping also for a more menacing looking Phantom as well.  So I give this version of Phantom of the Opera 3 stars, taking away 1 star for the lack of Phantom menace.  Feel free to groan, but I had to make the pun.

The Wolf Man (1941)

The Wolf Man was the film that made Lon Chaney Jr. my hero as a kid.  I saw The Wolf Man on Chiller and thought it was fantastic.  The makeup effects looked amazing to a kid.  Of course the actual wolf man makeup was worn extremely well by Chaney in all of his appearances as Lawrence Talbot, and in a departure from having various actors take over for other actors in the monster roles, only Lon Chaney Jr. played Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, in all of his Universal appearances until the recent remake made long after Chaney’s death.

When I was going through my old VHS tapes recently, I actually found an old Chiller Theater presentation of The Wolf Man from the early 1980s.  This was long past the time of Seymour hosting the program by way of syndication, but it was still quite a thrill.  My daughter had never seen the original The Wolf Man, but she had seen the recent remake.  We settled in and watched the original.

I still think The Wolf Man is one of the better, action filled Universal monster movies.  I also think the Wolf Man, and werewolves in general, make for the scariest monsters.  Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy both moved incredibly slow, and while the Creature was fast in the water, on dry land he didn’t move quite as fast.  Dracula never bothered me, I guess, because I had never seen Dracula.  But the Wolf Man was fast.  If you started to get away, he could always drop to all fours and overtake you with ease.  He was also the most bestial of the monsters with the least bit of humanity left behind.  The Wolf Man wanted to rip your throat out and tear your guts out and eat you.  Frankenstein and the Mummy would choke you and then leave you for dead.  There was no open casket funeral after a werewolf attack. 

I mentioned earlier that the Creature was my favorite Universal monster, and Frankenstein’s monster was the favorite of my older nephew.  If I recall correctly, my younger nephew’s favorite was the Wolf Man. 

The Wolf Man gets 4 stars from me, and my daughter enjoyed it as well.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Unlike Dracula and The Mummy, I had seen The Invisible Man as a kid, despite it being one of the less famous Universal monsters.  In fact it wasn’t until just a few years ago that an Aurora style Invisible Man model kit was made.  Back in the day, you weren’t a real credible monster unless you had an Aurora model kit.

The Invisible Man is based on the novel by H. G. Wells.  It concerns a scientist that discovers a formula for invisibility that has a nasty side effect of also driving him insane.  The effects in this film are amazing especially considering the time in which they were filmed.  I think I probably enjoyed and appreciated this film more now than I did when I first saw it.  Claude Raines as the scientist turned invisible murderer is very good.  His performance is delivered more from his voice and inflection than a physical presence.

One additional treat for me during this viewing was watching a very young Gloria Stuart as the love interest.  Having been unaware of Ms. Stuart until seeing Titanic, it was a pleasant surprise to see her in such a classic film looking so young and lovely.

My daughter also seemed to enjoy The Invisible Man as we continued through the Universal Monsters box set.  I give the film 4 stars.

The Mummy (1932)

Of the classic Universal Monster movies, The Mummy was another of the ones I had never seen.  Most of the time when Chiller played a mummy movie, they chose one of the Lon Chaney Kharis movies.  The original mummy was Imhotep played by Boris Karloff.  I had seen many pictures of Karloff’s mummy, but had never actually sat down and watched the movie.  I was actually surprised at how little of the film the mummy is actually in.  Don’t get me wrong.  Karloff is in quite a bit of the film, but most of it is Karloff as a regenerated Ardath Bey, not a bandage covered mummy.

The Mummy concerns an expedition that accidentally brings back to life Karloff’s Imhotep by reading a sacred scroll.  The mummy steals the scroll and departs after driving one of the archaeologists into madness.  A few years later another expedition arrives and Karloff in his guise as Ardath Bey uses them to unearth the tomb of his beloved princess.  He then plans to use the scroll to bring his princess back to life in the body of a young woman.

The Mummy is a good movie, but for a monster fan, it is a little disappointing to get so little mummy action.  The mummy make-up looks fantastic, but it is just on-screen for too short of an amount of time.  The Mummy gets 3 3/4 stars for skimping on the mummy.

Dracula (1931)

Chiller Theater used to air a good chunk of the classic Universal Monster movies when I was a kid.  There were a few of them that I never did see aired.  Dracula was one of those.  I remember watching Son of Dracula and House of Dracula, I believe, but the original with Bela Lugosi never seemed to air.  Now it’s possible it aired and I simply missed it, but in those pre-home video days, I was usually extremely careful about any chance to catch one of the classic horror movies.  The fact that I hadn’t seen Dracula before made it especially nice to sit down with my daughter to watch it as we worked our way through my Universal Monsters box set.

Dracula was the first of the classic 1930’s horror movies and like Frankenstein which was released the same year, many things that we take for granted these days were not there yet, most notably a musical soundtrack.  These days we just accept that a movie will have themes and all types of incidental music playing throughout.  The films of the early 1930s, however, were just slightly removed from the silent film era and the idea of scoring a movie wouldn’t come along for a few more years.  A Phillip Glass score was added to the film in the late 1990s by Universal to try and make the film more modern, but my daughter and I decided to watch it the way it was originally presented.

Another item that was absent from the original that most people would swear to being in the film was Dracula’s fangs.  Lugosi performed the role completely fangless.  It was not until later films that vampire fangs were first witnessed.  I first learned of this fact as a child reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and was surprised by it then.

Dracula is inarguably a horror classic, and Lugosi’s performance is an iconic one as well.  Dracula is another 4 star classic in my opinion.  Not only is it a wonderful, atmospheric film, it has armadillos in it.  I love armadillos.  In the words of Robert Preston’s character in Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., “Make an armadillo happy, and the world is your oyster.”

The Bride of Frankenstein

After watching the original Frankenstein, I pulled out The Bride of Frankenstein for my daughter to watch.  Many horror buffs consider The Bride of Frankenstein to be the greatest of the Universal monster movies.  I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I completely agree.  The monster gets to grow emotionally and intellectually, and we get a female monster as well with the most iconic hair-do in motion picture history, but I still prefer the original in many ways.

Probably my strongest memory of The Bride of Frankenstein has nothing to do with the movie, but with the Aurora models of the Universal monsters.  During the 1970s, Aurora re-released all of their classic monster kits in square boxes with glow in the dark parts being a huge selling point.  I had all of these kits, but there was one monster kit that Aurora chose not to re-release and that was The Bride of Frankenstein.  The Bride was a masterpiece as plastic model kits go.  The monster was on a laboratory slab with all sorts of lab equipment and body parts strewn about the kit.  It was molded in grey plastic.  I knew all of this because my best friend, Keith Harris, had a copy of it that he had gotten from an older sibling.  Keith eventually traded it to me and it was the crown jewel of my monster collection.  I pained it up and did the absolute best paint job that I had ever done.  To this day I still have this model.  Of course I also purchased one or two copies of the Polar Lights recasting that was done in the late 1990s.  It’s funny that two of the things that brought me the most joy as a kid, figure kit model kits and comic books, are both practically ignored by kids today.  They have no idea what they are missing.

My daughter enjoyed watching The Bride of Frankenstein and I was taken back to thoughts of catching it on Chiller as a kid.  I remember quite well the opening bit where Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelly and describes the further events that befell the Frankenstein family.  The fact that Lanchester herself also played the monster bride later in the film was a true delight to me as a kid.

The Bride of Frankenstein is another 4 star classic in Universal’s stable of monster classics.

Frankenstein (1931)

My daughter enjoyed The Creature from the Black Lagoon and decided that she wanted to watch The Bride of Frankenstein.  I told her that she really needed to watch Frankenstein first, so we sat down and put in the Frankenstein DVD that came in the Universal Monsters box set.  I had seen Frankenstein on Chiller when I was a kid.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  The opening where one of the actors comes out and warns audiences about what they are about to see seemed like such a novel idea.  Of course when I saw Frankenstein on television back in the early 70s, the only prints available were the still censored versions.

Just as the Creature was my favorite of the Universal monsters, the two nephews that I grew up with each had favorites as well.  One nephew was a year older and one was a year younger.  Frankenstein was the favorite of the older nephew.  I guess with Frankenstein you got all the supporting characters as well, and Frankenstein also had more movies than the other monsters with the possible exception of Dracula.  I remember how as kids we all read my copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Castle of Frankenstein, and The Monster Times.  One of the big topics with Frankenstein was the scene where the monster throws a little girl into a lake and drowns her.  All of the prints available to us at that time cut out the actual scene where the monster throws the little girl in.  This was one of those holy grail lost scenes for us as kids like the spider pit in King Kong and the 1910 Edison version of Frankenstein.  We had read about it extensively and in some cases had pored over black and white stills of the missing moments.  At one point we actually thought the entire scene with the little girl had been cut out.  When I found a stationary pad that had an image of the monster and the little girl kneeling by the lake at the top of every sheet, it was as if I had discovered a lost Picasso.  I still remember that paper.  The image was a line drawing that was colored in like a comic book panel with the primary colors.  There was no shading or blending of colors.  It was like one of the old paint by number sets they used to sell.  To me, however, it was gorgeous.

As much as we heard about the censored scene of the little girl, the other censored scene was never spoken of in the magazines we read.  When the monster first moves, Henry Frankenstein proclaims that now he knows how it feels to be God.  This line was just a little too blasphemous for the Hayes code and audiences of the time.  The line was covered up by a crack of lightning and thunder.  In the years since my youthful screening of the film, film historians had set about restoring the original film.  The footage of the little girl was found and added back into the print, and the line of dialogue was also found and put back in the film as well.  The DVD contained both of these long missing scenes.

The story of Frankenstein and the making of the film and it making a star out of Boris Karloff  are fairly well-known.  Bela Lugosi had been offered the part, but turned it down because of the heavy makeup and lack of dialogue.  It was sadly one of his biggest mistakes.  The film is a definite classic of the horror genre.  It and Dracula were the films that started the Universal Monster series of films.  To me, these films are just as important as the Disney animated classics.  Frankenstein gets 4 stars.

As a footnote, I had read recently where the long thought lost 1910 Edison version of Frankenstein had been discovered.  As excited as that made me, imagine my surprise to find out that the entire 13 minute film was available to be watched on the Internet.  I sat down at my computer and finally witnessed the film that all of us kids had heard so much about.  By today’s standards, it’s not much, but if you have any imagination and can let your mind go back and think about what it would have been like to witness this film back in 1910, it is nothing short of amazing.