Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics

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Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics; Warner Home Video set, October 6
Topic Started: Jun 15 2009, 07:57 AM (417 Views)
Frank Hale	Oct 14 2009, 04:10 PM Post #16
Balcony Gang, Foist Class Posts: 828 Group: Members Member #59 Joined: October 6, 2005	I’ve been waiting 45 years for a chance to revisit The Walking Dead, and it held up quite well. Lots of Curtiz touches, and a cast of old pros including favorite slime-balls Ricardo Cortez and Robert Strange. I would never have recognized Marguerite Churchill, even after all those Fox boxes I’ve been watching. A big problem, however, is that the young couple, whose dithering ensured Mr. Karloff’s death, were never punished or even condemned. The commentary suggests that the original treatment had them held until too late by the gangsters. This would have been a big improvement, but, as it is, we have the question of why the Master Scriptwriter didn’t go after them also. Bad box office, I suppose.



Laughing Gravy	Oct 25 2009, 09:17 PM Post #17
Revered in the UK Posts: 11,073 Group: Admin Member #1 Joined: August 31, 2005	Warner Bros. has released a little something for horror fans that can’t get enough of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; a 2-disc set of four films that are would be considered the nadir of their iconic careers if they hadn’t starred in The Ape (Karloff) and Bride of the Monster (Lugosi). Which is actually being mean; here in the Balcony, we like all of these movies, although we also like Ish Kabibble, so take our opinion accordingly. The set is entitled Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics ($26.98) but could well have been called The Walking Dead and included the others as throwaway bonuses and nobody would’ve much cared (or noticed). Dead is a 1936 Warner Bros. gangster picture with a walking corpse in it. It’s a minor gem directed by the great Michael Curtiz. Ricardo Cortez is one of the mobsters and Edmund Gwenn is the scientist who brings the executed Karloff back to life; Boris has a silver streak through his hair that makes him look like Mr. Bride of Frankenstein, oddly enough. Boris also stars in Allied Artists’ Frankenstein 1970 (1958), but I don’t think he ever included it on his resume. A film crew comes to town to shoot a movie at the actual Frankenstein castle, not realizing there’s the actual Dr. Frankenstein who lives there is building a brand-new monster. Karloff shares screen villain time with Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre in the 1940 comedy-musical You’ll Find Out, which was actually an RKO-Radio Pictures vehicle for Kay Kyser. Mr. Kyser’s orchestra (including the aforementioned Mr. Kabibble) was a mainstay of radio with the “Kollege of Musical Knowledge”, but don’t ask me, that was way before my time. Speaking of RKO, when they weren’t trying to tailor vehicles to the peculiar talents of Ish Kabibble, they were trying to fool the ticket-buying public into believing that the studio-built team of Wally Brown & Alan Carney, who looked like Abbott & Costello, were as funny as Abbott & Costello, which they most certainly were not. The only one of their films that anybody remembers is… well, okay, nobody remembers ANY of their films, but the least unforgotten one is Zombies on Broadway (1945), which besides its million-dollar title has Lugosi as the chief zombie-maker, Sheldon Leonard as the tough gangster, and Brown & Carney as the guys who aren’t Abbott & Costello. You know you’re in trouble when your rotund funnyman disappears for nearly the entire last reel of the film. All four movies look and sound fine, particularly Frankenstein 1970, and there are trailers for two of the films and commentary on two of them as well, and if you listen to them you’re more hardcore for this stuff than I ever will be.



panzer the great & terrible	Nov 11 2009, 08:34 PM Post #18
Mouth Breather Posts: 10,356 Group: Members Member #13 Joined: September 3, 2005	You like Ish Kabbibble? How does you do that?
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