The Bela Lugosi Box: 15 Frightful Films [5 Discs]The Bela Lugosi Box: 15 Frightful Films [5 Discs]

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DVD FEATURES:
  • Region: All
  • Number of Discs: 5
  • Screen: Black and White
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
  • Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
  • Features:
    • 100 Years of Horror: Bela Lugosi (hosted by Christopher Lee)
AWARDS
  • Telluride Film Festival
  •     Film Presented - 1994
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
REVIEWS:
  • Bela Lugosi's stint with Monogram is usually considered a waste of the great star's talents, but The Corpse Vanishes may just be the exception. For once, Lugosi doesn't have to carry the whole show by himself, but is offered good support from the cat-like Elizabeth Russell ("Don't touch me, you gargoyle," she shrieks at poor Angelo Rossitto), the always watchable Minerva Urecal and the peppy Luana Walters, the film's true star. Usually wasted in typically empty ingenue roles, Walters tears into this assignment with gusto, matching Lugosi all the way, but always with her tongue firmly planted in cheek. One question remains, however: Why is Dr. Lorenz sleeping in a casket? ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
  • Bowery at Midnight is simply a bad movie, but for those of us who revel in campy horror pics, it's worth watching. Truth to tell, it barely fits into the "horror" genre, placed there mostly because of the presence of the great Bela Lugosi and a Zombie subplot that seems to have been grafted onto the film as a result of Lugois's participation. Otherwise, Bowery is pretty much a crime thriller, albeit not a particularly good or convincing one. Lurid and melodramatic, Bowery's script doesn't make much sense and is totally unbelievable and is filled with wince-inducing dialogue. It does, interestingly, throw in a few tidbits of sociological interest, but the dramatic aspects of the script are strictly from hunger. Wallace W. Fox's direction is of the "get the shot and move on to the next one" variety; it's not good, but it has a certain efficiency and innocence that's some how appealing. The cast handles its cheesy chores in typical fashion, with the exception of Lugosi, who manages to rise above the material, even while playing down to its baser instincts. He makes even the most ludicrous moments enjoyable, and frequently fascinating. Again, Bowery is not anything like a good movie -- but it's much more entertaining than other films that are technically much better. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
  • Despite the presence of Bela Lugosi, David Manners, and Edward Van Sloan, all veterans of Dracula (1930), The Death Kiss is not a horror flick, although Sono Art-World Wide Pictures' original art copy certainly hinted that it was. Instead we have a whodunit set in a movie studio, which is certainly interesting enough. Said studio is actually the old Tiffany Productions, which at the time had entered into partnership with Sono Art. With language-mangling Alexander Carr as the studio boss, a harried director (Van Sloan), and a glamorous but headstrong star (played by glamorous but headstrong Adrienne Ames), The Death Kiss is also a sly parody of Hollywood in general. Bela Lugosi plays it straight, however, and is of course highly suspicious. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
  • If you can get past racial slurs such as the description of several murdered Chinese as "better dead than alive" or the likening of Asian people to monkeys, Bela Lugosi's thick Hungarian accent, and some inconsequential jabbering between Wallace Ford and Arline Judge, Mysterious Mr. Wong may be for you. If not, you're in for a long, tedious tour of a backstage Chinatown peopled by the likes of the aforementioned Mr. Lugosi, Edward Peil and Fred Warren, in other words, low-budget Hollywood actors in bad Oriental get-up. Mysterious Mr. Wong, incidentally, has nothing in common with the later series of surprisingly clever whodunits starring Boris Karloff. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi
  • In 1953, George Jorgensen had an operation to become Christine Jorgenson, in what would become the first largely publicized sex-change operation. This sensational story in the headlines interested producer George Weiss, which made it possible for the little-known director Edward D. Wood Jr. to make his first feature. As a married heterosexual and practicing cross-dresser, Wood wanted to make an intensely personal film dealing with tolerance for his lifestyle, starring himself in a cashmere sweater. For very little money and a shooting schedule of less than two weeks, Glen or Glenda? was hardly seen by anyone outside the budding exploitation circuit at the time of its release. Using a construction of flashbacks as told through rambling pseudoscience, the movie feels like an educational film strip, albeit a poorly constructed and incomprehensible one. A showcase of Wood's infamous ineptitude, the personal stories of two transvestites are spoken with ridiculous dialogue, terrible acting, and interspersed with irrelevant stock footage. Every so often, a drug-addicted Bela Lugosi would appear with some strange and pointless narration. For all the fun to be had by the silly inconsistencies, Glen or Glenda? is also increasingly dull. It may be memorable as one of worst movies ever made, but its content is not very exciting compared to the horror and sci-fi travesties of Wood's later work. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
  • It is altogether typical of Bela Lugosi's lousy business judgement that he accepted one of his finest film roles for a mere $500 dollars. In the haunting low-budgeter White Zombie, Lugosi stars as Murder Legendre, a shadowy character who exercises supernatural powers over the natives in his Haitian domain. Coveting beautiful Madge Bellamy as his bride, wealthy Robert Frazier is refused her hand in marriage. He enters into an unholy agreement with Lugosi, whereby Madge will fall ill and die, then be resurrected as a zombie-and, implicitly, Frazier's love-slave. This is accomplished, but Lugosi, relishing the hold he has over Frazier, refuses to release Madge's soul. She is ultimately rescued from Living Death by her faithful beau Robert Harron and missionary Joseph Cawthorn (heretofore merely the comedy relief). Few talkie horror films have ever so expertly captured the "feel" of the silent cinema as White Zombie; the film's ethereal, ghostlike ambience enables the audiences to accept even the most ludicrous of plot twists. The producers, Victor and Edward Halperin, use the film's tiny budget to their advantage, evocatively suggesting the horrors that they haven't the financial wherewithal to show on screen. Lugosi is superb throughout, making the most of such seemingly innocuous lines as "Well, well, we understand one another better, now." Long ignored or shunted aside as insignificant, White Zombie can hold its own with any of the like-vintage Universal horror classics. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
  • Plan 9 From Outer Space has been unjustly deemed the worst movie of all time. It's true that cardboard gravestones are knocked over, that scenes change from day to night at a moment's notice, and that half of Bela Lugosi's scenes are shot with a taller stand-in who has trouble keeping his vampire's cape on his shoulders. But technical gaffes like these are shared by a number of low-budget sci-fi films with plots that equal the absurdity of this epic's tale of extraterrestrial grave robbers. What distinguishes Plan 9 from less interesting failures is the bizarre but sincerely overwrought screenplay from now-famous director Edward D. Wood Jr. As in his other works (such as the autobiographical Glen Or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster), Wood's words expressed far more of his interior obsessions, beliefs, and philosophies than any other hack churning out similar kiddie spook shows. It's clumsy poetry to be sure, but Wood loved the movies and tried to speak through them. An alien invader's soliloquy on the stupidity of modern man comes off like a strange man on the bus, demanding to tell you what's wrong with the world. Most of Wood's films have this strangely direct feel to them, but Plan 9 From Outer Space is definitely the tightest synthesis of the man's personal idiosyncrasies and his deep desire to tell a story that everyone would love. As a result, it's proven itself to be immensely popular, a rare combination of accessibility and outsider vision that unfortunately never paid off within Edward D. Wood Jr.'s lifetime. ~ Fred Beldin, Rovi
  • The Ape Man is for many a made-in-camp-heaven classic; for others, it's a sorry waste of a talented actor whose typecasting doomed him to a sad life. If one can forget that horror star Bela Lugosi was forced to forego his considerable talent and appear in dreck such as this and that this contributed to his early death, it's easy to have a ball at Ape Man. This is, clearly, one of the worst horror films ever made. Inept is too kind a word for the writing and directing. It's almost as if writer Barney A. Sarecky was trying to prove something, perhaps that it is indeed possible to write a screenplay at one sitting, with your eyes closed, creating dialogue only by drawing it blindfolded from a goldfish bowl filled with random sentences cut from "The Big Book of Cliched Sentences." Director William Beaudine's work is atrocious, as is typical of this reviled hack, with no imagination or interest evident at all. The acting, even by the talented Lugosi is at best substandard. All of which, if one is in the right mind, does mean that Ape can be a hoot, especially the ending, which seems to have wandered in from a Tex Avery cartoon. For camp mavens, it's a treat; for Lugosi fans, it's an ordeal. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi
  • There's a lot that's been said about Bride of the Monster, and most of it is true. It is ineptly made and it has seams -- including mismatched interior and exterior sets and scenery that shakes during the fight scenes -- that show a mile off. And it has a script that's a mix of cliches from mad-scientist movies and hardboiled reporter lingo, interspersed with some of the strangest incidental dialogue that anyone had ever heard in an English-language movie up to that time -- at least, one made in an English-speaking country, but therein lies its charm. Bride of the Monster was the biggest-budgeted movie ever made by director Edward D. Wood Jr., and is, along with the crime-thriller Jail Bait, his most accessible film. Although it has continuity problems (a pencil behind the ear of a newspaper morgue clerk won't stay put from angle-to-angle -- although, to be fair, no less a director than Alfred Hitchcock had those same kind of problems in movies like North By Northwest) and badly matched footage, it is a smoother movie than Wood's magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space. In contrast to Plan 9's ultra-cheap surroundings, which gave it an almost other-worldly look throughout, like a nightmare in slow-motion, Bride of the Monster follows the conventions and expectations of a B-movie crime-thriller and horror story, giving the viewer some familiar points of reference to work from. The typical Wood sexually tinged argot is also muted somewhat in the dialogue, and what is here manages to be entertaining without diverting the viewer's attention from the plot. This movie was as close as Wood ever got to making a successful film, although he had to compromise in many areas of the production to get it shot. Wood's significant other, Dolores Fuller, who ended up with a tiny scene in the film, would have been a better lead, but would-be actress Loretta King played the female lead because Wood had thought she had a significant amount of money to put into the production (she didn't). Tony McCoy, the male lead, isn't bad for a non-actor. Wood got financing from McCoy's father, a meat-packing magnate, who insisted that his son play the lead and also that the movie end with a huge nuclear explosion as a warning about the atomic bomb. There is a lot to laugh at in the movie, most of it unintentional, although one attribute that is a complete myth concerns Bela Lugosi's dialogue . His accent is very thick, as always, but in describing Tor Johnson's Lobo, Lugosi does NOT say "he is as gentle as a kitchen." The movie was the first of what was ultimately a trilogy of horror films from Wood -- the others were Plan 9 From Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls -- all linked by one common character (police officer Kelton, played by Paul Marco) and their plots, which mix elements of police procedural and horror films. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

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