Frankenstein (1931)

 

FRANKENSTEIN  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Whale

    Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff,

    John Boles, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr,

    Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Marilyn Harris

The original, with Karloff as the monster.

Isle of the Snake People (1971)

 

ISLE OF THE SNAKE PEOPLE  (1971)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Jhon Ibanez

    Boris Karloff, Julissa, Carlos East, Tongolele,

    Quintin Bulnes, Rafael Bertrand, Santanon

Draggy, dreary horror about voodoo, snakes and zombies on a remote tropical island. One of four low-grade features Karloff appeared in shortly before his death. The movies were produced in Mexico, while Karloff, in a wheelchair except when the cameras rolled, did his scenes in Los Angeles. The films are a testament to the old man's work ethic, if nothing else. All were released posthumously. 

The Ghost In the Invisible Bikini (1966)

 

THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI  (1966)  ¢ ¢

    D: Don Weis

    Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley, Basil Rathbone,

    Boris Karloff, Susan Hart, Quinn O'Hara,

    Jesse White, Harvey Lembeck, Nancy Sinatra,

    Patsy Kelly, Claudia Martin, Francis X. Bushman

Boris Karloff comes to in his coffin and learns he's been dead for a week. Through a crystal ball, he watches a rat's nest of characters descend on his old haunted house for the reading of the will. They include a boy and a girl, a crooked lawyer, an assassin and his accomplices, a motorcycle gang, a truckload of kids just up from the beach and a gorilla. There are songs for the kids to gyrate to, and a lot of moronic slapstick as the characters chase each other through the house and into the chamber of horrors downstairs. The studio was American International, in case you couldn't tell. Boris seems amused by it all, maybe because he was smart enough to stay in his crypt, watching the nonsense from a distance, through his crystal ball.

The House of Rothschild (1934)

 

THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alfred Werker

    George Arliss, Boris Karloff, Loretta Young,

    Robert Young, C. Aubrey Smith, Arthur Byron

    Reginald Owen, Alan Mobray, Holmes Herbert

War and romance, banking and anti-semitism in a period piece set in Europe in the time of Napoleon. Produced while Hitler was seizing power in Germany, the movie has the eerie effect of looking back on the past while foreshadowing events that were just around the corner. Arliss gives a droll performance as the head of the Rothschild financial empire, and Karloff registers something close to pure evil as the murderous Count Ledrantz, a Prussian whose compulsive ruthlessness would not be out of place in the Third Reich.

Haunted Honeymoon (1940)

 

HAUNTED HONEYMOON  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arthur B. Woods

    Robert Montgomery, Constance Cummings, Leslie Banks,

    Seymour Hicks, Robert Newton, Googie Withers

Lord Peter Wimsey (Robert Montgomery) buys an old country house as a gift for his bride (Constance Cummings), so what happens? The man he buys the house from turns up murdered. Not only that, but Lord and Lady Wimsey have sworn a mutual oath not to get involved in any more detective work. The mystery part of the story almost doesn't matter in this one. There are long stretches of the film where it disappears entirely, and nobody seems to care. Which makes you wonder: Suppose they made a movie like this where somebody gets murdered and the crime just never gets solved. Has anybody ever done that? And if not, how come?

The Gunfighter (1950)

THE GUNFIGHTER  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry King

    Gregory Peck, Millard Mitchell, Helen Westcott,

    Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier,

    Anthony Ross, Richard Jaeckel, Verna Felton

A gunfighter drifts from town to town, hounded by the law and challenged by every hot-shot kid with a six-gun. He'd like to stop drifting and settle down and not be a target everywhere he goes, but he can't escape his past or his reputation. He's Jimmy Ringo, "the fastest gun in the West," and he's doomed. A relatively low-key frontier drama, really a study in gunslinger psychology, that in a vague way reflects film noir, while anticipating an era of darker, more complex westerns that would follow in the decade ahead. Peck gives one of his best performances in the title role. Millard Mitchell plays his partner from the old days, now a town marshall. Karl Malden's a bartender with a sharp eye for business. Richard Jaeckel and Skip Homeier play young punks who don't think Peck looks all that tough. (They're wrong about that.) There are parallels to "High Noon", and it clocks in at a quick 84 minutes, thanks to Barbara McLean's editing and the efficiency of Henry King.

The Green Knight (2021)

THE GREEN KNIGHT  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: David Lowery

    Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton,

    Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie,

    Ralph Ineson, Barry Keoghan, Erin Kellyman

The young nephew of King Arthur takes up the challenge of a mysterious Green Knight, and embarks on a heroic quest involving bandits, a fox, some giants, Saint Winifred, a lord who's obsessed with hunting and the lord's seductive lady, all leading up to a second, climactic encounter with the Green Knight. The emotional payoff is limited, but the movie looks like a storybook come to life, and Lowery has a real instinct for how to tell an age-old tale cinematically. The script is literate, with moments of tongue-in-cheek humor - the potential for a Monty Python-style spoof is obvious - and the arboreal knight of the title bears an uncanny resemblance to Groot in the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies. 

Happy Birthday, Dr. Sporgersi