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| Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:43 PM |
| Happy Halloween |
 by Fëanor |
Poppy and I are watching monster movies on Halloween. A great tradition. We caught Devil Bat earlier, a pretty hilarious movie featuring Bela Lugosi as a bitter, vengeful scientist who uses "shaving lotion" to mark people for a hideous death from his giant (rubber) pet bat. Then we caught the end of Frankenstein, and followed that up with Son of Frankenstein.
I tend to think of Bride of Frankenstein as the only truly great Frankenstein movie, but the sequel, Son of Frankenstein is also pretty fantastic. The cast is amazing, first off. It's the last movie with Karloff as the monster, and he gives the character all the pathos and power he always has. Basil Rathbone plays the title character, a prideful scientist and aristocrat with no idea what he's really getting into. Bela Lugosi turns in a truly amazing performance as the sinister, manipulative, and seriously creepy Ygor. A surprising stand-out is Lionel Atwill as Inspector Krogh, the one-armed, monocled character that Mel Brooks so successfully makes fun of in Young Frankenstein (it's actually amazing how many elements Brooks lifted whole from the old Frankenstein movies for his parody). Though the monocle and false arm could so easily be ridiculous, Atwill manages to make Krogh a believable, sympathetic, and even rather complex and interesting character.
The sets are almost their own, extra character, wonderfully surreal and nightmarish, and they remind me of nothing so much as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - everything is wild angles, yawning spaces, secret crevices, and impossibly tremendous doors. There's also a really great scene where Frankenstein's cute little boy tells a story about a giant he met, and you, his father, and the inspector slowly realize who he's really talking about, while the other characters just laugh at how imaginative the boy is. Rathbone's character finds himself at harder and harder pains to hide the truth about what he's doing and what's really going on around the house, to the point where it actually gets rather funny.
Anyway, check it out. It's worth a watch. |
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