Month: October 2025

I don’t know if this is an authentic Australian poster for this film or not (it actually only got an M rating for cinema release, and the R rating didn’t come until it went to video, so I suspect “not”), but either way godDAMN that’s a nasty tagline… as well as picking up on the famously spurious end-quote of the film, it also picks up on the film’s equally famous child character, Bob… played by Giovanni Frezza, who was subjected to an infamous dubbing job that has always been considered bad even by early 80s Italo-horror standards. Implying that Bob, or whoever dubbed him, is the real monster of that film is harsh… and yet not wholly unfair either. That said, I have it now on blu-ray with the Italian soundtrack, and I have sampled some of the scenes with Bob in Italian (going to do a full rewatch of the “Gates of Hell” films at some point soon), and I’m not sure he’s much better in that form…

And we finally finish those hitherto unwatched Karloff films from Eureka that have been sitting around for a while… like the last film, this is period gothic melodrama (apparently the last of a number of such films Universal made at that time) in which Karloff is second-billed for advertising purposes but actually only has a rather small role in which he is underused (though he’s not as wasted as Lon Chaney Jr, in his last Universal film, is as the mute heavy). Once again, it’s the other two male leads who get the stronger stuff, with Richard Greene as a British gentleman travelling incognito to the Black Forest in search of two missing friends, and Stephen McNally as the villainous Austrian count who has, you may not be surprised to learn, murdered the aforementioned missing men as revenge for an attack on him in an African expedition. Whew. Karloff’s a doctor again in this one, physician in service to one of the count’s associates, and to give him credit, he plays this small part like it were a lot bigger and makes the doctor kind of ambiguous for much of the film. This was supposed to be directed by Joseph Pevney like the last film was, but he huffed off when Universal wouldn’t let hin make script changes… accordingly, art director Nathan Juran got promoted to proper director two weeks before shooting began, and I think did a pretty fair job of disguising what appears to have been a slightly complicated production; the end result is a pretty good example of this sort of thing, and I’ve got a few more Juran films in the watchlist so we’ll see them eventually too. In the meantime, I shall rather miss uncle Boris, cos I’ve only been watching films with him for the whole month. Let’s see what comes next…

Back to glorious black and white for this one. This finishes off Eureka’s “Maniacal Mayhem” set, which also gave us Karloff in The Invisible Ray and Black Friday; this time, though, the maniac is actually Charles Laughton… Karloff was second-billed for advertising purposes but he’s actually pretty secondary as a character; Laughton is the real star, playing the Sire Alain de Maletroit, a not especially nice man about to carry out the last part of a rather extended revenge plot against his brother, who married the woman he loved and, well, Alain is not the forgiving type… Taken from an early R.L. Stevenson story, with how much fidelity I don’t know (I see one critic calling it more a remake of the 1935 Raven, and the climax definitely seems to have been “inspired” by that), this is about as implausible as Victorian melodrama gets, and the film just leans into that, especially Laughton who is quite ripe here; Richard Stapley provides enough ham of his own as the male hero, an insufferable boor who turns out to be a shithead with a heart of gold. Karloff is quite restrained as the sorely beset servant Voltan who must save the Nice Young Couple from Alain’s dastardly scheme. And if it is frankly all a bit unlikely, it’s mightily good-looking in that unlikeliness, with some pretty decent shadows dressing up those period sets. Surprisingly violent, too; obviously not hugely explicit thanks to the Production Code still being a thing in 1951, but there’s one particular bit of implied nastiness near the end that’s a bit yikes-inducing considering the period. Enjoyed this a fair bit. Incidentally, just a week before production began there was actually a TV version of the original short story; wonder if that still exists somewhere, cos I’d be interested to compare and contrast…

Been a while since we saw a film in colour, hey? Karloff came back to Universal for this one, which is quite a difference from the films we’ve seen lately; apart from being in colour, it’s a damn sight more expensive and, at 86 minutes, markedly longer than those Columbia B films. But Karloff is still the mad doctor here, albeit of a different kind… This was intended as a sequel to Universal’s 1943 Phantom of the Opera—a story which neither needs nor wants a sequel, really—so they bought the rights to a play that, as far as I know, had nothing to do with Phantom and then changed it about so the final film had nothing to do with the Phantom story nor indeed the original play… On the plus side, it does have the 1943 film’s sets (themselves reused from the 1925 version) and its colour as well, so if nothing else it’s a pretty handsome production. And, alas, I didn’t think it was much else; it generally didn’t seem to know entirely what it was trying to be, ending up kind of negligible as horror/suspense and as a music film too… for a film with so much singing in it, too, I found the music ftankly kind of crap; director George Waggner had been a songwriter before he was a director, and, well, he wasn’t at full capacity in this instance… Alas even more, neither was Karloff, who was running on kind of low wattage here; the Nice Young Couple played by Susanna Foster (star of Phantom ’43) and Turhan Bey do actually outshine him. The story’s attempt to create a mystery over the previous prima donna’s disappearance is immediately undone by showing what happened within the first reel, so it wastes that as well. It’s not bad but it really should’ve been better than it was.

The BBC have a nice piece on the 40th anniversary of Mr Gordon’s infamous adaptation of Mr Lovecraft’s infamous story:

The film was part of a sub-genre of excessively gory horror films that became known as “splatter horror”, a term coined by director George A Romero to describe his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead. From the 1960s until the late-1980s, such “splatter” films thrived, and were defined by their focus on physical gore and lack of interest in any real moral framework, or ideas of good and evil.
But while other films of this type might have similarly forced audiences to audit their relationship with the disgusting, they did so with a corrosive cruelty. Re-Animator, by comparison, is so in-your-face, so perverse, and so caked in blood that viewers cannot help but revel in the absurdity. “It’s really hard to have that participatory thing that a theatre production allows in a movie,” Combs says. “And he really did that!” When revered film critic Roger Ebert reviewed it, he noted that it was “a movie that had the audience emitting taxi whistles and wild goat cries”.
That theatrical bravado, somehow transplanted onto the screen, means that as Re-Animator rockets to a bloody climax, it becomes “not just a gore film which delivers splattery mayhem [but] also a wildly effective dark comedy”, says Duffy.
According to Combs, however, Gordon genuinely believed he was making a serious film, and the decision to play for laughs was largely down to the individual actors. “Our instincts told us we have to find release points for the audience,” he says. “I didn’t really talk to Stuart about it – neither did Bruce [Abbott] – but it’s something we decided to do. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a bombardment of gross stuff.”

Kind of stunned to think anyone might think Re-Animator was meant seriously (unless you were a reasonably young kid or something), given that Lovecraft’s original story may not be a comedy as such but it’s certainly one of his less serious efforts. The article also notes how little business it did:

When Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Market in May 1985, the initial reaction from both audiences and critics – most notably Ebert and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael – was ecstatic. Kael labelled the film “pop Buñuel… as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified – light-headed and happy”.
However, “it didn’t do anything theatrically,” says producer Brian Yuzna about its subsequent general release, making just over $2m (£1.5m) at the US box office.
That it failed to become a blockbuster hit like A Nightmare on Elm Street was in part because Yuzna declined to submit the film to the ratings board and risk cuts. Many cinema chains at the time would not screen unrated films, and newspapers often refused them advertising space. “It was very well-received,” Yuzna continues, “but from the beginning it didn’t get any real distribution [from Empire International Pictures].”

I mean… yeah, that was going to happen when you insisted on releasing the thing unrated back then, not much point complaining about it. (Empire notably insisted on Gordon’s next film From Beyond getting an R rating. That film actually did worse business, so…) Cf. its contemporary, Day of the Dead, where George Romero was given the choice of a larger budget for an R-rated film or a smaller budget for an unrated one; Romero took the latter despite knowing it’d probably damage the film. But he made his choice and, as far as I know, never complained about it. (Day also did far better business than Re-Animator on a nonetheless much bigger budget, but it did have the advantage of being the long-awaited next part of a popular series, so…)

Mike Duffy, who’s cited above, also makes an interesting point about another film, wondering if the comedic turn of Evil Dead 2 would’ve been as well received without Re-Animator‘s example. This kind of ties in with the point about the “seriousness” of Gordon’s film, cos I’ve always wondered that about the original Evil Dead and just how “seriously” it was really intended. How much did my viewing of it as at least partly a black comedy depend on knowing the sequel was meant as one? How much was it that the wilful and deliberate extremity of the whole was just too much to take seriously? I don’t know, don’t suppose I ever shall… But anyway, that’s another couple of films for a rewatch one day, along with Re-Animator itself, obviously… last I saw it was about 20 years ago, at which time it had actually lost a bit of its lustre for me, but it’s years later and it’s time for another go…