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One of the most celebrated names associated with the genre, the late, great Bla Lugosi is regarded as horror royalty to this day. Starring in some of the most revered cinematic offerings that the golden age of horror had to offer and renowned for his frequent collaboration with fellow horror icon Boris Karloff, the Hungarian-American actor announced his arrival on the scene in Hollywood during the 1930s with Tod Browning's Dracula - a legendary role that he is now virtually synonymous with - and never looked back.

While he often lamented the fact that he was forever typecast as a villain courtesy of his thick accent and imposing physical appearance, Lugosi embraced this status quo by breathing life into an array of the genre's most enduring dastardly characters. While many of his films were decidedly not perfect, the actor provided the foundations for many of horror's most archetypal character molds,...

The 1963 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic poem The Raven starred some of the most iconic horror actors of the 1960s, and was one of eight Poe-inspired movies released in just five years. As Poe is most famous for writing horror, it might be surprising to learn that he also wrote comedy, which usually featured puns. The Raven movie also mixed horror with humor, making its gothic horror movie premise into an early horror comedy. While The Raven bombed among critics of the time, it became a cult hit, earning an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score.

The Raven is about a trio of rival sorcerers. Horror legend Vincent Price plays Erasmus Craven, who is mourning the death of his wife, Lenore. Its titular raven is Dr. Bedlo, a sorcerer under a spell, and played by Peter Lorre, who often ad-libbed the funnier lines. Boris Karloff is the final member of the trio,...

These last few years the Criterion Channel have made October viewing much easier to prioritize, and in the spirit of their ’70s and ’80s horror series we’ve graduated to––you guessed it––”’90s Horror.” A couple of obvious classics stand with cult favorites and more unknown entities (When a Stranger Calls Back and Def By Temptation are new to me). Three more series continue the trend: “Technothrillers” does what it says on the tin, courtesy the likes of eXistenZ and Demonlover; “Art-House Horror” is precisely the kind of place to host Cure, Suspiria, Onibaba; and “Pre-Code Horror” is a black-and-white dream. Phantom of the Paradise, Unfriended, and John Brahm’s The Lodger are added elsewhere.

James Gray is the latest with an “Adventures in Moviegoing” series populated by deep cuts and straight classics. Stonewalling and restorations of Trouble Every Day and The Devil, Probably make streaming debuts, while Flesh for Frankenstein,...

Thrillers from the Vault – 8 Classic Films

Blu-ray

Mill Creek Entertainment

1941, 1942, 1943, 1951 / B&w / 1.33: 1 / Blu ray

Starring Boris Karloff, Anne Revere, Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi

Written by Robert Andrews, Edwin Blum, Randall Faye, Arch Oboler

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, Lew Landers, Arch Oboler

This is part two of a review for Mill Creek Entertainment’s Thrillers from the Vault, 8 Classics Films. Part one can be found here.

The Devil Commands is a hell of a title, and it’s a pretty good movie too. Released in 1941, Edward Dmytryk’s spookfest stars Boris Karloff as Julian Blair, a scientist whose experiments are a family affair—his wife Helen is one of his subjects.

Blair achieves his goal—a machine that records thought processes—but on a night he should be celebrating, his wife is killed in a car crash. Something breaks inside Blair and when he discovers that Helen may continue to live on through his invention,...

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Maureen Arthur, who starred on Broadway and the big screen as the ambitious mistress and secretary Hedy La Rue in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, has died. She was 88.

Arthur died Wednesday of natural causes at her home in Beverly Hills after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease, her brother Gerald told The Hollywood Reporter.

The vivacious Arthur also portrayed a nudie-magazine cover girl opposite Don Knotts and Edmond O’Brien in The Love God? (1969), a divorced woman who romances Bob Hope in How to Commit Marriage (1969) and an office tramp alongside John Phillip Law in The Love Machine (1971), based on a Jacqueline Susann novel.

Arthur played the bubble-headed Hedy in the national touring company of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which had opened on Broadway in October 1961 en route to a spectacular run of more than 1,400 performances,...

Universal Horror Collection: Vol. 1

Blu ray

Shout! Factory

1934, ’35, ’36, ’40 / 1.33 : 1 / 66 / 61 / 79 / 70 min.

Starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi

Cinematography by John J. Mescall, Charles Stumar, George Robinson, Elwood Bredell

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, Lew Landers, Lambert Hillyer, Arthur Lubin

Like the cat who swallowed the canary, Boris Karloff made for a serenely sinister antagonist. Even when portraying bloodthirsty devils like the vampire Gorca in The Three Faces of Fear or a debauched satanist looking for trouble in The Black Cat, “Dear Boris” was the very model of a well-mannered monster.

Bela Lugosi, Karloff’s unofficial rival on the Universal lot, showed similar restraint in his star-making turn as Dracula – but the same halting, imperious manner that gave otherworldly dignity to the Count would typecast Lugosi as a kind of oddball antihero – the cultivated eccentric driven to madness or worse. He approached each of those roles with a manic intensity that might net...

CineSavant contributor and advisor Gary Teetzel revisits a film he reviewed for us seventeen years ago. Instead of continuing to play his greatest role for Universal, Bela Lugosi ‘returns’ as a generic vampire in a very Dracula-like tale for Columbia. He’s still the best fiend for the role. The show introduces a novel demise for Lugosi’s creature of the undead, plus a furry-faced werewolf to compete with Universal’s Wolf Man… a werewolf that talks.

The Return of the Vampire

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1943 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 69 min. / Street Date February 19, 2019 / 27.99

Starring: Bela Lugosi, Frieda Inescort, Nina Foch, Roland Varno, Miles Mander, Matt Willis, Ottola Nesmith, Gilbert Emery.

Cinematography: L.W. O’Connell, John Stumar

Film Editor: Paul Borofsky

Original Music: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Written by Griffin Jay, Randall Faye, Kurt Neumann

Produced by Sam White

Directed by Lew Landers

Reviewed by Gary Teetzel

For Bela Lugosi, Hollywood’s...

Who says that vampires and werewolves can't work together? Bela Lugosi stars as a bloodsucker out for revenge alongside his werewolf aide (Matt Willis) in The Return of the Vampire, coming to Blu-ray on February 19th, and ahead of its release, Scream Factory revealed the full list of special features for the 1943 film, including three new audio commentaries:

Press Release: In 1918, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), a 200-year-old Hungarian Vampire, prowls the English countryside, feeding from the jugulars of the villagers. But Tesla's reign of terror is interrupted when a pair of scientists, Lady Jane and Sir John Ainsley, drive a railroad spike through his heart. The "un-dead" Tesla remains safely entombed for two decades until the impact from a stray Nazi bomb accidentally releases him. Along with his werewolf servant Andreas Obry, the resurrected vampire now plots vengeance on the family that put a halt to his nocturnal feasting. On...

Here's a brief look – to be expanded – at Turner Classic Movies' June 2017 European Vacation Movie Series this evening, June 23. Tonight's destination of choice is Italy. Starring Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue as the opposite of Ugly Americans who find romance and heartbreak in the Italian capital, Delmer Daves' Rome Adventure (1962) was one of the key romantic movies of the 1960s. Angie Dickinson and Rossano Brazzi co-star. In all, Rome Adventure is the sort of movie that should please fans of Daves' Technicolor melodramas like A Summer Place, Parrish, and Susan Slade. Fans of his poetic Westerns – e.g., 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree – may (or may not) be disappointed with this particular Daves effort. As an aside, Rome Adventure was, for whatever reason, a sizable hit in … Brazil. Who knows, maybe that's why Rome Adventure co-star Brazzi would find himself playing a Brazilian – a macho, traditionalist coffee plantation owner,...

Ten years ago I attended the Lone Pine Film Festival for the first time. It was the 17th annual celebration in 2006 of a festival dedicated to the heritage of movies (mostly westerns, but plenty of other genres as well) shot in or near the town of Lone Pine, California, located on the outer edges of the Mojave Desert and nestled up against the Eastern Sierra Mountains in the shadow of the magnificent Mt. Whitney. The multitude of films that could and have been celebrated there were most often shot at least partially in the Alabama Hills just outside of town, a spectacular array of geological beauty that springs out of the landscape like some sort of extra-planetary exhibit, a visitation of natural and very unusual formations that have lent themselves to the imaginations of filmmakers here ever since near the dawn of the Hollywood filmmaking industry.

In writing about the...

After The Seventh Victim‘s disappointing returns, Val Lewton and Rko clashed over their next project. Lewton wanted a comedy, provisionally titled The Amorous Ghost, as a change of pace; studio boss Sid Rogell, Lewton’s bete noir, insisted on a sequel to Cat People, which Lewton resisted. Then Rko suggested a Universal-style monster rally, They Creep By Night, reuniting villains from past Lewton pictures. Charles Koerner rescued Lewton from this absurd prospect by pitching a maritime thriller. “Call it The Ghost Ship,” Koerner ordered. Lewton also scored a big, though past-his-prime star in Richard Dix, an Oscar nominee for Cimarron (1931).

The result is equal parts The Sea Wolf and M, with a dash of Edgar Allan Poe. Tom Miriam signs on as third officer on the ill-starred freighter Altair, ruled by Captain Stone (Richard Dix). At first Stone merely seems strict, but his homilies about authority take on a...

Teresa Wright ca. 1945. Teresa Wright movies on TCM: 'The Little Foxes,' 'The Pride of the Yankees' Pretty, talented Teresa Wright made a relatively small number of movies: 28 in all, over the course of more than half a century. Most of her films have already been shown on Turner Classic Movies, so it's more than a little disappointing that TCM will not be presenting Teresa Wright rarities such as The Imperfect Lady and The Trouble with Women – two 1947 releases co-starring Ray Milland – on Aug. 4, '15, a "Summer Under the Stars" day dedicated to the only performer to date to have been shortlisted for Academy Awards for their first three film roles. TCM's Teresa Wright day would also have benefited from a presentation of The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), an unusual entry – parapsychology, reincarnation – in the Wright movie canon and/or Roseland (1977), a little-remembered entry in James Ivory's canon.

Teresa Wright: Later years (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon.") Teresa Wright and Robert Anderson were divorced in 1978. They would remain friends in the ensuing years.[1] Wright spent most of the last decade of her life in Connecticut, making only sporadic public appearances. In 1998, she could be seen with her grandson, film producer Jonah Smith, at New York's Yankee Stadium, where she threw the ceremonial first pitch.[2] Wright also became involved in the Greater New York chapter of the Als Association. (The Pride of the Yankees subject, Lou Gehrig, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941.) The week she turned 82 in October 2000, Wright attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Somewhere in Time, where she posed for pictures with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In March 2003, she was a guest at the 75th Academy Awards, in the segment showcasing Oscar-winning actors of the past. Two years later,...

Teresa Wright and Matt Damon in 'The Rainmaker' Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright vs. Samuel Goldwyn: Nasty Falling Out.") "I'd rather have luck than brains!" Teresa Wright was quoted as saying in the early 1950s. That's understandable, considering her post-Samuel Goldwyn choice of movie roles, some of which may have seemed promising on paper.[1] Wright was Marlon Brando's first Hollywood leading lady, but that didn't help her to bounce back following the very public spat with her former boss. After all, The Men was released before Elia Kazan's film version of A Streetcar Named Desire turned Brando into a major international star. Chances are that good film offers were scarce. After Wright's brief 1950 comeback, for the third time in less than a decade she would be gone from the big screen for more than a year.

Inner Sanctum

Written by Jerome T. Gollard

Directed by Lew Landers

USA, 1948

Two travellers, strangers to one another, meet on a train. One is a young, attractive, if tempestuous woman named Marie (Eve Miller), the other a much older man, Dr. Valonius (Fritz Leiber). The man has an uncanny ability to read the future with alarming accuracy, demonstrating his skill with simple predictions that impress his new traveling companion. He then shares a story he knows about a woman with the same personality as Marie. The story begins with a man named Henry Dunlop (Charles Russell) getting off a train at a small town only to be hysterically accosted by his current lover. Henry inadvertently kills the woman and, in a state of panic, dumps the cadaver on the balcony of the last cart just as the locomotive departs. Stuck in a tiny town on a rainy night, Henry finds...

Paul Henreid: From Eleanor Parker to ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (photo: Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker in ‘Between Two Worlds’) Paul Henreid returns this evening, as Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month of July 2013. In Of Human Bondage (1946), he stars in the old Leslie Howard role: a clubfooted medical student who falls for a ruthless waitress (Eleanor Parker, in the old Bette Davis role). Next on TCM, Henreid and Eleanor Parker are reunited in Between Two Worlds (1944), in which passengers aboard an ocean liner wonder where they are and where the hell (or heaven or purgatory) they’re going. Hollywood Canteen (1944) is a near-plotless, all-star showcase for Warner Bros.’ talent, a World War II morale-boosting follow-up to that studio’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, released the previous year. Last of the Buccaneers (1950) and Pirates of Tripoli (1955) are B pirate movies. The former is an uninspired affair,...

The great Italian poster artist Anselmo Ballester, who worked for more than half a century, has more breathtaking designs than I can encompass in one single post. So I thought I’d concentrate for now on one of his favorite subjects: Rita Hayworth, the Hollywood goddess in the face of whom Ballester seemed especially inspired.

I only came across Ballester’s work recently, struck by his unusually torrid compositions and his superb handling of color, as well as something strange about the eyes of many of his protagonists (something about the whites of their eyes, not much in evidence in these posters, but often giving the impression that his subjects are the undead). When I asked Dave Kehr, author of the Museum of Modern Art’s invaluable 2003 book Italian Film Posters and an avid collector himself, about Ballester I knew I was onto a good thing when he called him “for my money,...

Lucille Ball, Easy to Wed Lucille Ball Centennial on TCM: Stage Door, Best Foot Forward Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Du Barry Was A Lady (1943) A night club employee dreams he's Louis Xv, and the star he idolizes is his lady love. Dir: Roy Del Ruth. Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly. C-101 mins. 8:00 Am Panama Lady (1939) An oil man forces a cabaret singer to work for him after she tries to rob him. Dir: Jack Hively. Cast: Lucille Ball, Allan Lane, Steffi Duna. Bw-65 mins. 9:30 Am Without Love (1945) A World War II housing shortage inspires a widow to propose a marriage of convenience with an inventor. Dir: Harold S. Bucquet. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball. Bw-111 mins. 11:30 Am Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) An inept secretary goes to work for a bogus real estate firm thinking it's for real.

Did you already see The Old Donkey (Lao lutou, 2010; Li Riujun)?, folks asked us day in, day out all through Rotterdam, and for most of the festival, the answer was a grumpy, No., thinking, Can't be as good as 13 kleine Esel und der Sonnenhof (1958, d.:Hans Deppe)—production title: 13 alte Esel—and that's already not really good. It wasn't, as we finally found out: Whenever the quietly cheerful donkey was out of the picture and we were forced to deal with the film as such, boredom ruled—another one of dem PRChinese Indies straight from the arthouse-for-Do-Gooders assembly line.

A donkey was also the unannounced star of Huangjiang nüxia (The Swordswoman of Huangjiang, 1930; Chen Kengran), although we're not too supportive about the way he's treated: The eponymous heroine uses it as her means of transport. Harrumph. Yet, in this case we're willing to make an exception, as the swordswoman...

Given the success of Warner’s Archive program, we’re thrilled to see other studios scouring their vaults for content aimed at the discerning cinephile. Here’s a release showcasing the latest coming from MGM via Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment:

Los Angeles (April 14, 2011) – Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing even more classics to DVD in April through its unique “manufacturing on demand” (“Mod”). The newest group of films will be part of the MGM Limited Edition Collection and available through online retailers. The vast catalog ranges from 1980’s Defiance to 1965’s four-time Academy Award® nominated A Thousand Clowns.

Enjoy your favorite movies from across the decades including:

1950′s

● Davey Crockett, Scout (1950): A U.S. military scout is assigned to stop Indian attacks on a defenseless group of wagon trains making their way West. Stars George Montgomery, Ellen Drew, Noah Beery Jr. Directed by Lew Landers.

● Cloudburst...

The rest of this month has some exciting genre output on display at the wonderful Egyptian and Aero Theatres, hosted by the American Cinematheque.

Currently running, the Egyptian’s Lust and Larceny: Noir City, the 12th Annual Festival of Film Noir will wrap up on April 18. Friday, April 16 beginning at 7:30pm will be a double feature of 1955’s thriller Crashout, followed by 1954’s brutal revenge melodrama Cry Vengeance. Neither of these films are currently available on DVD. Saturday will see a double feature of horror director Lew Landers’ The Power of the Whistler from 1945 and starring Richard Dix (Val Lewton’s The Ghost Ship), as well as its follow up of the same year, Voice of the Whistler, directed by horror legend William Castle! In attendence will be Robert Dix, son of star Richard Dix.

Running from April 29 through May 2, the Egyptian presents A Wrinkle in Time: The Best of Time Travel Films.

New technologies often lead directly to the death of old technologies, and that's what happened with VHS. It changed home viewing habits forever, and then itself was killed off by DVD. It was a slow death that finally ended last fall, when the last major supplier of VHS tapes quit the business.

That might be that -- out with the old, in with the new, and all that rubbish -- except when VHS died, it might have taken an untold number of innocent victims along with it to the grave. "Hundreds of important and critically acclaimed films [are] no longer readily accessible for home viewing," reports Anthony Kaufman at Moving Image Source. "In the wake of video-store shutdowns across the country, and a move toward DVD-only subscription services modeled after Netflix and digital download initiatives, the non-digitized movie is becoming an endangered species. The death of VHS has long been foretold...