Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
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
The early sound period has always fascinated me, especially in how studios suddenly needed to find ways to release films in different markets with different languages when changing out intertitles had been enough since the advent of the medium. One thing they did was simply film multiple versions of a movie. This is probably the… Continue reading Drácula
The first official cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's seminal novel (the tales of the illegality of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu tickle me), Tod Browning's Dracula is a handsomely produced gothic romance that manages to capture enough of the novel to retain a semblance of a story while removing any kind of emotional investment. At only 74-minutes… Continue reading Dracula
This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually do. It addresses some of my issues with a movie monster, has some great individual sequences, but I don't think it actually comes together all that well. It's got a couple of ideas that it introduces and never explores with… Continue reading Prey
#2 in my ranking of the Scream franchise. This is probably the best sequel to the original Scream, and that ends up kind of sad. The 2022 entry in the franchise is a perfectly acceptable, if unimaginative, reboot/sequel thing that balances new and legacy characters to varying degrees of success. It also seems to want… Continue reading Scream (2022)
David Vining, Author 