The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Young Henry (Richard Greene), heir to the Baskerville Estate, gets to move in early when uncle Charles dies of a heart attack. Or was he eaten by a phantom hound? No, it was a heart attack. Anyhow, Charlie’s good buddy Dr. Mortimer thinks the family is cursed (you now, by a hound) and young Henry’s life is in great danger. He goes to the legendary Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) for help.

Remember when I covered the 1959 Hammer version? You do? I don't, to be honest. That was almost seven years ago, and yes, I still haven’t read the source story. I may have gotten details wrong there, so hopefully I’ll do better here.

In a pre-Cumberpatch world, Holmes and Watson were synonymous with Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. (Remember Nigel from Suspicion?) The pair did fourteen Holmes films between 1939 and 1946. Impressed? Twelve were between 42 and 46, plus they even made an appearance in an unassociated comedy. Now THAT’S a production schedule! As such, their style and performances became the standard for all future versions.

The character of Watson (in a pre-Martin Freeman world) was that of a portly, somewhat pompous windbag. A complete foil to Holmes’ understated genius. That characterization comes from Nigel Bruce. The Watson from the stories was the admiring and frequently confounded narrator, not dissimilar to Freeman’s depiction.

Veteran studio hack John Carradine played the suspicious butler. This was just about when his career was taking off. That same year he’d appear in Stagecoach and eventually build a reputation in the world of horror. Also appearing is Lionel Atwill as the good Doctor. He too would spend time working the Universal horror circuit. Come to think of it, Basil himself also had a brief spell there.

The Baskerville estate lies, apparently, on a rocky asteroid, far from civilization but with unusually fast mail delivery. Anyhow, they hold dinner parties,  perform seances, and fall in love while waiting for the mythical hound-beast to eat them all. Or not. Hard to tell.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was a lot of fun. A better than fair mystery with great atmosphere, the kind Old Hollywood sometimes did well. There were red herrings and amusing moments, and a good time was had by all. Except those who died. The next one won't be too far off. AMRU 3.5.

“Oh, Watson - the needle!”

House of Dracula (1945)

Dracula (John Carradine) needs help. He hates the life of the undead superhero, so he seeks out the good Doctor Edelmann. Surely he can solve the problem. Drac gets all mysterious what with him needing to only come only at night. Under the microscope, Dr. Edelmann discovers that Drac's blood contains a large number of midi-chlorians ...

Also seeking free help is Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr), hating his proto-wolverine existence. Doc concludes Chaney's head ... that is, Talbot's head ... isn't soft enough. Meanwhile, Drac starts making moves on Doc's lovely-ish assistant, wolfie jumps a cliff trying to end his life, and they then stumble upon Frankenstein's Monster sitting in the muck. And it's about then that I realized that this series has finally run it's course.

The problem of crowding the film with monsters is two-fold. First, you lose focus on a central story. Are we following Drac's plight or Wolfie's? Secondly, screen time for each is drastically cut. Frank's Monster is barely in it and Drac makes an earlier than expected exit. Maybe it would have worked better if you made the monsters the direct protagonists rather than spiral the story around the doctor and his assistants. Still, make the climax a duel between wolfie and Drac, and lose the Monster instead of using him as a Deus ex machina of sorts. Better movies don't have you re-writing them in your head while watching.

Code standards has that monsters must die at the end of the film. As such, there has to be a vaguely plausible explanation why the actors were getting work again. We completely forgo this in Wolfie and Drac's case. Lionel Atwill, at death's door, makes one last appearance. As a cop, once again. And no Universal Horror can be considered complete without a hunchback assistant. Here is the only unexpected twist the film offers: the hunchback is a hot chick. Seriously. And the mad scientist character is ... well, I'll hold off on that.

Here we rest the original run of the Universal Horror series. Typical in acting and production quality of the series. My biggest mistake was grouping the movies by central character. I should have watched them in sequence instead. If I watch them again, that's what I will do. So, how come they never invited the Mummy to the party? I'll finish them off next October. AMRU 3.

Invisible Invaders (1959)

Aliens from the moon decide to invade Earth. Humanity never saw them because they, their cities, and machines, are invisible. They demand that all humans immediately surrender. They issue this ultimatum to peacenik scientist Adam Penner (Philip Tonge) by way of dead scientist college Karol Noymann (John Carradine). Did I forget to mention they can raise the dead? Oh, yea. They can do that.

Anyhow, the completely unreasonable people of Earth don't buy Penner's story, so our invisible moon-men give us one final warning at a hockey game. Failing that, they give another final warning at a football game. Then they invade.

By invade, I mean they raise lots of corpses from the grave to sabotage power plants and whatnot. To save all Earth, the military whisks Dr. Penner, his hot daughter (Jean Byron), and her douchie man-friend (Robert Hutton) to an impenetrable underground laboratory. And by the military, I mean one guy. Major Bruce Jay (John Agar).

What I love about 50's sci-fi is the "What If" factor. For instance, what if you wanted to make an alien invasion movie, but didn't have the budget for space ships or alien costumes? I know, make them invisible! So, this movie actually follows the tried and true formula of alien graverobbers invented by the trailblazing film Plan 9 from Outer Space. Gosh, what a lineage!

Also similar to Plan 9 is the use of an overbearing narrator. Obviously this story is way to complex for us to understand by watching the action and listening to the dialog. We need the major plot points dictated at us. While there are a great many similarities between the movies, Invisible Invaders is a vastly less imcompetent effort. The dialog was not horrible, the acting above amature theatre level, and the sets, while sparse, didn't shout CHEAP.

Also, to be somewhat fair, you do get a glimpse of a space ship and an alien, although that does beg the question Why? But don't stop there. If the alien war machines are invisible, why raise the dead in the first place? Why not just shoot everything from the air? Then they could have saved all that money spent on cheap, crappy zombie makeup.

Not painful to watch, vaguely interesting, but unoriginal and culturally insignificant. AMRU 2.

What was Carradine thinking even appearing in this low budget stinker? He was in, by his own admission, a lot of crap. There are no interesting quotes from the film so I leave you with one of John's. A bit of advice he should have given his son:

"Never do anything you wouldn't want to be caught dead doing."

House of Frankenstein (1944)

Or, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 2.

Not really, but almost. The evil doctor Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his faithful assistant Igor ... I mean Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) escape from prison, commandeer a travelling circus, and head for Visaria in order to take up the good doctor Frankenstein's work. Said circus also happens to feature the bones of Dracula (John Carradine), which if you take the stake out, his evil body reappears.

While searching for Frankenstein's notes in his demolished mansion, they stumble across the body of the Monster (Glenn Strange) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr). Stop me if you heard this one before. Anyhow, Niemann promises Daniel a proper body so that he can woo this hot gypsy chick, promises to keep Dracula's coffin safe during the day, and promises Wolfie that he will kill him. Instead, the douche, he totally uses his new circle of friends to work on his real project: getting the monster back to full strength and killing the people who sent him to prison. And what would a Frankenstein flick be without Lionel Atwill in there someplace. Once again, he plays an inspector.

So, Karloff took a break from Broadway to appear in the movie, but apparently Lugosi wasn't free. Seems he took up Boris' role. Therefore, Carradine becomes a lackluster Dracula. And speaking of which, what, was he in the movie a whole four minutes? The only reason I can imagine for his appearance is to make the movie poster more crowded with monsters and to introduce him for the next movie. I understand there was a thought to include The Mummy as well, but that would have been ridiculous.

A few interesting points: As this movie mostly takes place in "Visaria", which sounds like "Vasaria" where Ghost Of was set, the evil doctor house is that of the other brother's, and he was the least evil of all the Frankenstein's. Nobody from the actual family appears, unless you count the Monster. George Zucco had a small part as the circus owner. I had to go online to find out what role he played. It was all too brief. And, Chaney, Strange, and Naish all died in 1973. Chaney and Naish's collective last movie was the schlocky Dracula vs. Frankenstein, which I totally have to watch.

Thirteen years after the advent of Universal's reign as the king of horror, we are seeing their demise. The appearance of a large, slow moving creature isn't enough to scare audiences anymore and compensating with a monster mash has limited appeal. There is one more, however, but I will explore that with the Dracula line. Eventually.

Despite this, I actually found House Of to be a bit of a rebound for the franchise. It was fun. Doesn't touch the early work, but every bit as good as Son Of. AMRU 3.5.

The Black Sleep (1956)

Doctor Ramsey (Herbert Rudley) is condemned to die for a murder he did not commit. He is visited by his old medical school professor, Sir Cadman (Basil Rathbone), who gives him a drug to make the final execution painless. Painless, indeed!

Ramsey dies of an apparent heart attack and the body is delivered to Cadman, who gives him an antidote to wake the dead doctor up. Odd way to recruit assistants, but who am I to judge?

Well, the good Doctor Cadman brings the good doctor Ramsey to his eerie castle to perform horrible brain experiments on anonymous "volunteers". Things are going well until the troublesome hottie Laurie (Patricia Blair) interferes. It seems the evil Mungo (Lon Cheney Jr.) who is always trying to kill her, is her father. He got that way after Cadman experimented with his brain. Spoil sport.

Not a bad movie, on the whole. Low budget and not terribly original, but worth the time spent watching it. This was Bela Lugosi's last film (Plan 9 does not count) and he looked mostly dead as the mute butler. John Carradine had a small but memorable role and Creighton was serviceable as the mute brute. What Tor Johnson was doing in the film, I have no idea. I don't think he had more that 30 seconds of screen time. I guess they wanted to get as many famous horror names in as possible. Karloff had more sense, but what was Basil's excuse?

Akim Tamiroff had a memorable role as a gypsy who retrieves the volunteers for Rathbone's experiments. The role was offered to Peter Lorre, but he asked for too much money. I can totally see him in the role, but Tamiroff was diabolically excellent. I'll keep an eye out for more of his work.

All in all, vaguely creepy, nice atmosphere, and nice to see all the familiar faces. Totally unoriginal and lacking a little punch, but better than some I've given a 3.0 to.

"Mungo only pawn in game of life."

No, wait. that was a different movie.

Stagecoach (1939)

A bunch of people are sharing a stagecoach ride from Tonto, Arizona (not kidding) to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Each has their own back story. The principle problem is that Geronimo is on the warpath, which means he is active in his attacks on the heathen invaders (that'd be us whities). The Calvary has offered an escort for part of the way.

Along the way, they meet up with escaped murderer, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne). Seems Ringo busted out to git the man who shot his paw. And his brother. The man that shot them both. As luck would have it, that man is in Lordsburg. That place is totally hopping.

Ringo hitches a ride, principally because the Sheriff was riding shotgun (youngsters take note: that's what that means!) and will take Ringo into custody once they reach their destination. So, the outlaw joins the group of the wife looking for her soldier husband, the drunken doctor, the banker, the gambler, the hot chick of ill repute, the liquor salesman, the eskimo, the indian chief, the space pilot, the ... ok, I fibbed about a couple of those.

Anyhow, at every stop their prospects look worse and worse. The Calvary can't protect them, evidence of injun attacks is everywhere, and lady-looking-for-husband is getting sick. Whatever shall become of them?

This here is a character study. Most of the people don't know each other and they all have their own secret. As the story progresses and the challenges become more intense, their character is revealed.

Excellent movie. Chuck full of western stereotypes and character actors, this granddaddy of the the modern western is the movie that made John Wayne a star. Before Chuck Norris was Chuck Norris, there was John Wayne. Wayne never gave nobody a karate chop, but at least he could act. Sure, Chuck was a great martial artist, but his acting was absolutely craptacular. Back in the day, nobody was tougher than the Duke. Nobody. AMRU 4.