Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
This is what every B-movie monster mash wanted to be: a mixture of heady thematic ideas and pure entertainment, but very few ever got it as right as James Whale did in Bride of Frankenstein. Alternatively intelligently advancing the ideas presented in the first Frankenstein film while also providing pure camp as a counterbalance, Bride… Continue reading Bride of Frankenstein
Carl Laemmle Jr. finally got James Whale to come back to make another horror picture, having tried to get him to direct The Mummy, and Whale ended up making one of the least typical of these early films. It's something between a thriller and a black comedy, and it works remarkably well, all the more… Continue reading The Invisible Man
Dracula was a big success for Universal and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. set out to follow up the gothic romance with something similar in terms of tone and reputation. What he ended up picking was an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel about man conquering nature to create life and the fallout that follows. Eventually… Continue reading Frankenstein
#8 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. I'm going to come to Human Desire's defense. The second cinematic adaptation of Emile Zola's La Bete Humaine (the first was by Jean Renoir, another very good film in its own right), is a noir that Fritz Lang imbued with his wonderful visual style, but he never… Continue reading Human Desire
#13 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Based on the poster, I really expected something pulpier than a straight adaptation of a stage play. I expected larger than life characters battling things out with each other in a game of wits to destroy everything around them. I mean, look at that, in the bottom… Continue reading Clash by Night
David Vining, Author 