My Favorite Universal Monster Movies

So I finally get to write this. Believe it or not, what became The History of the Universal Monsters was originally meant to be just a list of my favorite Universal Monster movies. Notice I said Universal Monster and not Universal Horror. Though I’ve liked the Lugosi/Karloff pairings I’ve seen in the past month and especially enjoyed The Raven, it is the monsters that keep me coming back for more.

Maybe by this time next year I’ll be knowledgeable enough to have a list of favorite Universal Horror films, but this is the year of the monsters. You’ll notice a lack of The Mummy/Invisible Man/Creature from the Black Lagoon movies. Well, that’s because I’m not all too familiar with those films and many of them I’ve never seen. Hey, I can always update this list next year too, right?

The Wolf Man also does not make my list. While I like the character, the movie doesn’t impress me when compared to Dracula and Frankenstein films. I like the Wolf Man in the monster mash ups, but I don’t think he carries a film well on his own.

It is obvious that the Frankenstein franchise was treated with the most care by Universal (again, the studio showing preference to KARLOFF) and the first two films from that line are two of the most respected movies in horror history. The only Frankenstein movie that does not make my list is 1942’s  The Ghost of Frankenstein.

Movie of the Day: Black Friday

Black Friday (1940) is yet another Universal movie starring Karloff & Lugosi (Maybe I should’ve just called this “Boris & Bela Month”). Much like The Invisible Ray, it’s not a horror tale as much as it is science fiction. Actually, at the core it is science fiction, but for most of the movie, it plays like a crime thriller.

Karloff plays Dr. Ernest Sovac, who ends up performing an unproven and illegal brain transplant on his friend Professor George Kingsley and gangster Red Cannon after they are involved in a car accident. Sovac’s intentions are honest, if puzzling, as he takes Cannon’s brain and puts it into Kingsley body, wanting to save the life of his friend (yet he does not tell anyone he has done this). To me, all that does is save Kingsley’s body if it is Cannon’s brain that’s kept living. It may be Kingsley’s body, but it really is Cannon.

Thankfully, it is later explained that only “part” of Cannon’s brain was transplanted into Kingsley’s body and both personalities are fighting for control in a Jekyll & Hyde twist (thus explaining how for the film’s first twenty minutes or so, it is the Kingsley personality being seen).

Anyway, Sovac learns that Cannon hid $500,000 somewhere and he decides to draw out that personality in an attempt to get the money. Sovac convinces Kingsley to take a trip with him to New York and he proceeds to give Kingsley a tour of Cannon’s usual hangouts in a sly attempt to get Cannon to take over. Of course, Cannon has scores to settle with his former gang,

Where is Lugosi in all of this you ask? Good question. He plays Marnay, a member of Red’s gang who is also trying to get the money and he isn’t used as much as he should have been, really only being the third most important character in the film. I don’t even think Karloff and Lugosi shared a scene in this movie. That’s just bad form, Universal! Kingsley/Cannon is the movie’s central character and Stanley Ridges did a great job going back and forth between kind polite professor and agitated gangster.

All in all, as a gangster movie, its a decent film and I enjoyed it better than The Invisible Ray, but I’d rather see Karloff and Lugosi sharing scenes in a horror movie.

Initially, Lugosi was scripted to play Sovac and Karloff was to be Kingsley, but Karloff insisted on playing the Sovac role and Bela got shuffled down to the second-tier Marnay character.

Movie of the Day: The Invisible Ray

The Invisible Ray (1936) is the third Karloff/Lugosi teaming for Universal. It’s quite a departure from the Poe-inspired The Black Cat and The Raven because this movie is mostly a science-fiction thriller and not an actual horror movie. It does not feature any of the creepiness or Gothic vibe of the two previously mentioned films. I still liked it just because I enjoy seeing Karloff and Lugosi outside of their best known roles.

The film features Karloff as Dr. Janos Rukh, a scientist who has developed a telescope that can look far into space, far enough to see images reflecting back of Earth’s past. After seeing a meteorite crash in Africa “thousands of millions” of years ago, Karloff and a group of his colleagues (including Lugosi as Dr. Felix Benet) head off to Africa to find what they believe will be a great new element Rukh calls “Radium X”. Rukh ends up getting radiation poisoning from his new find and begins to glow and now has a “touch of death”

The initial idea was that this new element could be used to heal people, but Rukh keeps toying around with the destructive abilities of it. Tired of Rukh’s strange and methodical ways, Benet and the rest of the crew take the element back to Europe and proceed to use it to heal people. Of course, this upsets Dr. Rukh because, well, did I mention that Dr. Benet has concocted a serum to keep Rukh’s poisoning in check and that the serum is slowly causing Rukh to go mad? Yeah, this doesn’t end well.

An enjoyable movie based on star power mainly, but it vaguely passes to be branded as “Universal Horror”. Seems like “Universal Science-Fiction” to me. If old scif-fi movies are your thing though, then yes, give this one a shot.

Movie of the Day: The Prowler

The Prowler is a decent slasher movie that was released in1981. I had been wanting to see this one for years but at the time I first heard of it, I think it was already out of print from its initial DVD pressing from 2002. It has since been re-released on DVD, so if you wanna see this one, don’t worry. Funny enough, it is that 2002 release that Netflix sent to me.

From the very first kill scene, I knew the awesome effects were Savini-esque… And I was right! I had totally forgotten Tom Savini had done the effects for this movie. The movie was directed by Joseph Zito, who would later go on to direct Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (again, Savini doing make-up effects) and two Chuck Norris films– Missing In Action and Invasion USA.

As I was watching this movie, I was instantly reminded of the original My Bloody Valentine (also released in 1981): small town, unsolved murders from decades ago during a special event, town relents and lets special event take place again and the murders start up again.

If I’m remembering what I’ve read about this movie, some of the kill scenes and gore were pretty controversial for the time and the theatrical cut took most of that out (same thing happened to My Blood Valentine), but luckily, the DVD edition is the unrated cut.

The acting is decent for the genre but the story is so-so with not a lot of explanation as to why some characters are doing certain things and there’s plenty of jump cuts and poor editing. So it wasn’t what I was expecting it to be, but I’m still glad I watched it. If nothing else, I can now say “yes, I have seen The Prowler“. If you’re a die hard slasher fan, this is a recommend but anyone else may be a bit bored with it.

Movie of the Day: The Ghost Breakers

It wasn’t until watching this movie for what I thought was the first time that I realized I had seen it before! I began to remember the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, but after that, I guess I must have used the movie as background noise or fallen asleep during it because it all seemed new to me.

The Ghost Breakers is a 1940 thriller/mystery/comedy that was just one in a large number of films Bob Hope did under his contract with Paramount Pictures. It is also the second movie he did opposite of the beautiful Paulette Goddard They first starred together in 1939’s horror/comedy The Cat and the Canary, which was released by Paramount but was a remake of the 1927 Universal silent horror film of the same name.

Of all the Bob Hope movies I’ve seen, this is one of his better non-Road movies. The movies displays a perfect balance of Bob Hope’s comedy brilliance and one-liners along with some actual spooky scenes later in the movie. Also of note is the further comic relief of Willie Best (who plays the valet of Hope’s character). Best has some of the best lines in the movie, if you can look look past the stereotypical 1940s “colored man” role he is playing (his entrance into the movie had me cringe a bit).

The movie starts off seemingly like a zany Hope comedy, another case of mistaken identity as a murderer and on the run from the mob.As radio crime reporter Lawrence Lawrence (his middle name is Lawrence too, y’know), Hope is quickly swept up into the current woes of Mary Carter (Goddard), who stands to inherit an old family castle down on Black Island in Cuba, but it appears someone or something doesn’t want her to come into possession of it!

Of course, all of this comes to a head in Cuba and on the atmospheric Black Island where murderers, thieves, ghosts, skeletons and zombies (of the voodoo variety) are abound!

Well worth looking into for Hope fans and it may not be a Universal movie, but this is also a recommend for anyone a fan of classic horror comedies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The movie is based on a play of the same name, but has actually been filmed twice before as a silent film. Once in 1914 with director Cecil B. DeMille and again in 1922. Both prints are lost. Another remake was released under the title of Scared Stiff starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in 1953.