Wednesday, March 08, 2006

More Val Lewton Goodness

The Body Snatcher – 1945

     An excellent movie! Boris Karloff turns in what may be his best performance (certainly the best performance of his I’ve ever seen). And while Karloff’s performance was excellent, Lugosi’s was sad. But more on that during the decision of the commentary.

This is the first movie where the time to suffocate a person is right. This one has much more horror elements than some of the earlier flicks, like Cat People or especially Curse of the Cat People. It still is character driven, the destruction of the soul by doing what’s wrong, even if you have the highest of reasons, even if it’s required.

There are subtitles here (it looks like they all will have, which is great!) and a commentary by two different people. But they are obviously not watching the movie. So they are more like interviews without an interviewer. They are, happily, both fascinating.  The first was by the director, Robert Wise himself. This must have been recorded for something else, as he had died before this box set came out. But it’s a good listen, wherever it came from. Mr. Wise talks about his time working for Val Lewton, and working with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. He claims that Lugosi was either sick or on drugs even then, as he had to handled carefully. And even though Karloff had serious back problems, he helped Wise “handle” Lugosi. Very sad.

The second person is film historian Steve Haberman. He puts the movie into its historical context, and has lots of details about the events surrounding the making of this movie. Great stuff that held my interest the entire time.

Four beers out of five

The Ghost Ship – 1943

     This isn’t a horror movie at all that I can see. It is, however, another character driven psychological study of the decent into madness by a man who takes on more responsibility than one should, but has the honor to try to maintain it. It’s an interesting watch, but I was actually glad that there weren’t any extras for it, as I wasn’t particularly interested in watching it a second time.

Three beers out of five (it was okay, but not as good as some of the others)