The animation that transformed the top-hat wearing Count Dracula into a bat in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula reminded me of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, Transylvania 6-5000. I hadn’t seen it in years, maybe since I was a kid, so I was excited to find it online in it’s entirety.
About House of Dracula – Glenn Strange returns as The Monster but footage of Lon Chaney (Ghost of Frankenstein) and Boris Karloff (Bride of Frankenstein) are used to pad the movie. Chaney also has a starring role as Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man who’s despair is at the heart of many of these movies. The poor immortal bastard just wants to quit chasing cars and howling at the moon, but every scientist he finds who’s willing to try to cure him turns out to be mad. Plus, they always turn out to have a fetish for reviving Frankenstein’s Monster that screws everything up by the final reel and leaves Lawrence Talbot once again in need of some new clothes and a case of flea collars. Poor WolfMan, he’s got the worst HMO ever.
The BBC recently ran a 5-part horror/comedy-type series about Zombies called “Dead Set.” The series has been well-received and also go lots of critical acclaim. I haven’t seen it, but I still enjoyed the piece Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) penned for the Guardian regarding the fact that the “Dead Set” zombies can run:
More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
Reservoir Carl and a few others in the know recommended some quality Zombie films for my Halloween fest, and I’ve noted the titles for a Thanksgiving marathon.
I always forget to recommend the podcast MailOrderZombie to Carl, so I’ll do it now.
Last night we only had time for one (so-called) fright flick – House of Frankenstein. Boris Karloff is back, but now in the role of mad scientist Dr. Niemann, who got in deep trouble with some villagers for transplanting the brain of a man into a dog. Or the brain of a dog into a man. Or something. Ygor seems to have stayed dead after Ghost of…but Bela is nowhere to be seen. The role of Dracula is now played by John Carradine, who can keep a straight face through pretty much anything. This one must have seriously tested his limits.
House of Frankenstein is where the Frankenstein mythology picks up a hunchback, who Karloff’s Niemann takes with him in the most improbable jailbreak ever and then forces to do his bidding by promising a new and improved body.
Niemann and his sidekick get control of a traveling Horror Show and cart their skeleton of Dracula to the Village that threw Niemann’s ass in the dungeon in the first place. Niemann removes the stake in Dracula’s heart and then wanders off to chip the Wolfman and Frankenstein out of the ice they’ve been preserved in since the end of Ghost. Lon is back as the Wolfman and Glenn Strange makes his debut as the Monster.
Intent on reviving the Monster, Niemann promises to cure the Wolfman by transplanting his brain into a new body. How that’s going to cure a werewolf is never explained, especially after we get the latest twist on the werewolf mythos – that it’s not enough to shoot him with a silver bullet, the gun needs to be fired by a woman who loves him. Luckily there’s a love triangle between a beautiful gypsy girl, the hunchback and the Wolfman, and Pretty Girl is quite the expert ammunition forger.
I won’t spoil the ending, mostly because I have no idea what happened at the end. Also because these movies are good goofy fun and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. But mostly because I have no idea what was going on.
Then we watched Countdown, The Daily Show, Colbert, and skipped through the Saturday Night Live special, which wasn’t especially special. I’m still agitated by this chilling Sarah Palin monologue.
Don’t know how the movie will turn out but the publicity pictures of Sherawat that accompany the article are pretty amazing. See also: Lynch’s uber-flop Boxing Helena. What’s that you say? You didn’t see it? That’s okay, neither did anyone else.
I do wonder if a snakewoman would really have webbed fingers….
The original post is on the BollywoodBuzz Blog, but be warned the site features annoyingly loud ads that yell at you as soon as the page loads.
The Haunting is every bit as good as when it came out. Beautiful cinematography filled with shadowy depth, a stellar cast, solid writing, amazing sets, and jolts and scares that come from subtle sound effects rather than flashy visuals that would look tired and dated 40 years later.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman grapples with eternal questions, such as, “What in the hell is going on in this movie?” and “I wonder when dinner’s going to be ready,” and “Did I take the clothes out of the dryer?” It’s the wolfman’s picture, the Monster is only in a few scenes. Although this one picks up where Ghost of Frankenstein left off (sort of), different actors play some key roles. Lon Chaney, jr, who played the Monster in Ghost, is, of course, Larry Talbot, the beleaguered Wolfman who wants nothing more than to end his eternal life. Bela Lugosi plays the Monster now, since Ygor died at the end of the last film but lived on in the body of the Monster thanks to a brain transplant. If you think too much about the continuity issues in this movie you’ll need a brain transplant by the end of it.
