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My favorite holiday
season, Halloween, is upon us again.
Opening in theatres this weekend is the
“prequel” The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre: The Beginning, yet another
of the many follow-ups to Tobe Hooper’s
1974 classic. While I appreciate the
raw, gruesome power of the original, I
find its franchise unpleasant, and on
the whole I prefer Halloween
entertainment of an earlier and milder
vintage. So here are a few DVD picks
suitable for family entertainment above
the level of very small children:
The Boris
Karloff Collection—Last year saw
The Bela Lugosi Collection, so it’s
only fair that this year Universal would
devote a DVD box set to Lugosi’s great
rival and frequent costar William Henry
Pratt, aka Boris Karloff. The set
includes five of the tall, lisping
Brit’s lesser-known and more offbeat
explorations of the strange and
sinister.
The first and
possibly best of the films is Night
Key (1937). This lively little gem
is less a horror film than a sort of
gangster-caper movie with a vaguely
sci-fi twist. Karloff plays the gentle
inventor of a security system who takes
revenge on the man who cheated him out
of an earlier invention. In Tower of
London (1939), a retelling of the
story of Richard III (Basil Rathbone),
Karloff plays the bald and businesslike
torturer and executioner of the title
edifice. The Climax (1944), the
set’s only offering in color, is a sort
of cross between Phantom of the Opera
and Trilby, with Karloff as a
Svengali-like mesmerist obsessed with
beautiful opera singer Susanna Foster.
Rounding out the
set are The Strange Door (1951)
and The Black Castle (1952), both
of them engaging Gothic costumers about
evil aristocrats menacing their guests
with dungeons and implements of pain.
Karloff has sympathetic roles in both,
and the great Charles Laughton hams it
up admirably as the rotten Sire de
Maletroit in The Strange Door,
which is based on a Robert Louis
Stevenson story.
This is a no-frills
collection—the movies don’t even have
scene access menus. But it still offers
plenty of creepy entertainment, and it’s
also heartening to see with what disdain
and revulsion torture was once held in
this country.
Gojira—For
those looking for something on a larger
scale, the brooding 1954 Japanese film
which we know, in an abridged and
altered 1956 form, as Godzilla, King
of the Monsters, has at last gotten
a decent U.S. DVD release. This
excellent and inexpensive two-disc set
lets us see how the big honking lizard
that came to be a figure of affectionate
fun started out in this film, made less
than a decade after Hiroshima, as a
terrible, dead-serious symbol of the
ravages that war had visited upon the
Land of the Rising Sun. The set also
includes the American version, as well
as some fascinating documentary extras.
Available on
October 10 is the Hollywood’s Legends
of Horror Collection, featuring six
non-Universal spookfests: Dr. X,
with Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, Mark
of the Vampire with Lionel
Barrymore, Lionel Atwill and Bela
Lugosi, The Devil Doll with
Lionel Barrymore, The Mask of Fu
Manchu with Boris Karloff and Myrna
Loy, the superb Mad Love with
Peter Lorre, and the not-so-superb (but
fun) Return of Dr. X, with
Humphrey Bogart in his only horror role.
Not available on
DVD until November 21—and not festive
enough, I suppose, for Halloween—is
An Inconvenient Truth, certainly the
scariest movie I saw all year. |
