Pros: Fantastic price for the set, and you can see two great horror icons in action.
Cons: I don't really know why "Black Friday" is included here.
The Bottom Line: This is a fine set showing Lugosi in some of his better pieces of work. The same could be said about the Karloff appearances here as well.
"Murders in the Rue Morgue"
This entry in the Bela Lugosi collection has about as much in common with its Edgar Allan Poe source material as Fulci's "The Black Cat" does. But, like "The Black Cat," this one is also undeniably entertaining. Lugosi made this film following the success he had with the true horror classic "Dracula," and in this he portrays a mad scientist, a type of character that would dominate most of the rest of his career. It certainly dominates this box set. But it was a character he was damn good at playing, completely owning all of his scenes. This movie is without a doubt campy, though truth be told it's actually a lot more stylish than the likes of some other Lugosi mad scientist flicks a'la "The Devil Bat."
Lugosi plays Dr. Mirakle who moonlights as a sideshow hypnotist with a trained gorilla for a sidekick. I'm guessing it's supposed to be an actual gorilla, though it's clearly...well, you know where I'm going with this. The gorilla kidnaps various beauties who Dr. Mirakle uses as guinea pigs for his experiments, which basically consist of him injecting them with ape blood. I think the experiment would work better if he just used a big tall hairy guy, but oh well. The gorilla then falls in love with a young woman, and sure enough the mad doctor sends the gorilla to go capture the said woman.
To describe this movie makes it sound like something on par with "Bride of the Monster," but the movie is especially great to look at, and it has some fantastic entertainment qualities to it. It's a foggy little film, with great shots of the river that hangs below a trap door where the dead bodies are disposed of. And the shots of the gloomy darkness at night is the work of a cinematographer who knows his stuff. Director Robert Floray would later put his directing talents to work on TV series like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "The Twilight Zone," and "The Outer Limits."
"The Black Cat"
Speaking of "The Black Cat"...sort of. This movie has absolutely nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story. It was just a title they gave to the film as a way for some sort of advertising based on the popularity of the Poe story. I'm almost surprised they got away with using Poe's name in the credits, because literally, this story has no comparisons whatsoever to Poe's work. But with that said, this is actually the best movie in this collection, and Lugosi's finest film next to "Dracula." His performance in this movie reminds us of why we watch his movies to begin with, even his bad ones. It's a very rare performance for him as well, not only being probably the best acting he's ever given on screen, but also the fact that we're truly rooting for Lugosi in this film. The film pits Lugosi against Boris Karloff, and the ironic thing is that where we have Lugosi playing probably the most likable character of his career, we've also got Karloff playing his most loathsome.
It's a very unique revenge film, and starts out with an American writer and his wife sharing a carriage with psychologist Dr. Werdegast (Lugosi). Riding along with Werdegast from a station, the car happens to break down, and the people take shelter in the home of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff). Poelzig is a supposed friend of Werdegast, and his home is built on the site of a WWI battlefield massacre. But as the movie goes along, we see the real motives of the characters and their dark secrets.
Werdegast has come for revenge against Poelzig for commanding that very battlefield which resulted in the death of Werdegast's wife. A shocking moment in the movie is where we see that Poelzig has the wife's body in a preserved state, but that Poelzig has also married Werdegast's daughter. The revenge here is actually more of a game of the minds as these two brilliant men compete against eachother in a chess game where the victor will have control over Werdegast's daughter, and if Werdegast were to lose, she would die in a Satanic ritual conducted by Poelzig. This is a dark, dark moody film that showcases two legendary horror icons in some of their best forms.
"The Raven"
And now we come to "The Raven," another Lugosi movie with the name taken from a work of Poe, yet has next to nothing to do with the source material. This one actually kind of does, sort, but in no way should the movie have actually been named after "The Raven." Lugosi plays a man who collects Poe memorabilia, and there are some frequent references to the poem "The Raven" only because someone mentions it by name, and there's an interesting scene where it is acted out on stage in a dance interpretation. But that's about it. The movie itself is pretty interesting though, a nice little predicament thriller.
With Lugosi and Karloff teaming up again after the success of "The Black Cat," this film has Lugosi as the villain of the picture. Lugosi plays a surgeon named Dr. Richard Vollin who is called upon to help save the daughter of a judge, who has been injured terribly in a car accident. Vollin becomes vixated upon the daughter, much to the anger of the judge who deems Vollin as mad beyond belief. But that's when Vollin comes across fugitive Edmond Bateman (Karloff) who asks the doctor to alter his face so he can go into hiding. The doctor begins to operate on Bateman, only turning him into a hideously deformed figure, and giving him the option to fix his face only if he will kill for him.
Agreeing to do so, Vollin invited the judge, his daughter, and her fiance to his home, only to have the night turn into a dreadful evening of terror where several of the doctor's Poe-like instruments of torture come into play. It's a pretty looney film, with Lugosi being as absolutely mad as ever, and it's a plot that's actually pretty damn good. So good that I wouldn't be against this being reworked into a modern day film, where I would assume it would be a bit longer than this film, which barely clocks in at over an hour.
"The Invisible Ray"
One of the early horror films to rely pretty heavily on special effects sequences, this outing from Lugosi/Karloff isn't quite as dark as their previous two collaborations, both it still contains some great hammed up performances and the battle between evil and, well, not quite as evil. In this film, it's actually Karloff who overdoes his performance with style, much more so than Lugosi, and it can honestly be said that Karloff might have made his character a little crazier than he needed to be, because when this character eventually does go off the deep end, he's not that much different than he was before.
Karloff plays a scientist who enlists the help of his fellow colleagues to join him on an expedition to Africa in order to study a meteorite. Tragedy then strikes when Karloff is affected by the radiation of the meteorite. Another well known scientist, played by Lugosi, forms an anecdote that saves Karloff from radiation poisoning. But there's a tiny little side effect that's still there. Whenever Karloff touches someone, they die. Just a tiny side effect, you know, like seeing blue. As far as the meteorite goes, Lugosi becomes a prominent figure in his field when he uses the controlled radiation to restore eyesite to those who are blind.
Feeling that his ideas have been stolen by his colleagues, Karloff seeks revenge against them. The movie kind of lost me a little bit here, because we're following Karloff as if we're supposed to either feel sorry for this guy, or we're supposed to understand his reasoning for revenge, but when you have these other guys curing blindness...say what you want about how they got there, they're heroes. Anyone who decides to kill them is just a jerk. But it's a good little flick regardless.
"Black Friday"
I really don't know why this movie is in "The Bela Lugosi Collection." The film stars Boris Karloff, and easily the supporting part in the movie is Stanley Ridges. Bela Lugosi has a minimal and unimportant cameo as just a gangster hood. Plus, Lugosi and Karloff don't actually share any scenes together, yet the movie was advertised as the latest in the Lugosi/Karloff series of horror films. It's inclusion in this DVD is like making 5 movie Sylvester Stallone box set and including "Bananas." But where as "Bananas" would actually be the best movie in that set, "Black Friday" is probably the worst one in this set. It's still not all together that bad, but definitely shows its poverty row horror film face more so than any of the others shown here.
It's a Jekyll and Hyde type story, where Karloff plays a brilliant surgeon who attempts to save the life of a dying professor (Stanley Bridges), who is also one of his closest friends. In order to save him, Karloff performs an illegal operation where he takes part of an injured gangster's brain and places it inside the head of the professor. Obviously the operation doesn't necessarily go as planned, unless the outcome was supposed to be the professor becoming a madman because of his duel gangster brain, but I doubt that was in the charts.
The movie does take a pretty interesting turn, that I really quite dig, where Karloff learns of the gangster's fortune of half a million dollars, and tries to exploit his crazed friend as a means to locating the money. Mixed in with this, we've got Ridges wandering around killing those who the dead gangster would want to strike revenge upon. It's a pretty interesting take on the Jekyll and Hyde story, certainly one I would have liked to have seen redone, or atleast have used Lugosi in larger role. When you've got the teaming of two of the greatest horror icons of all time, you don't place Lugosi in a role that could have easily been played by Crew Member #5 from "Star Trek."
******
The movies here look like they have been cleaned up a little bit from the times that I have seen them on pay cable, but there is still quite a few instances of grain and fog. Though that's not really a complaint so much, seeing how I am one that likes my classic Lugosi movies with a bit of grain. The sound works pretty well too, except for the fact that you can hear a little bit of a cracking noise when there is grain presence on screen.
As far as extras go,, each movie comes with the theatrical trailer. It's very reasonably priced as well, which isn't surprising from Universal's Franchise Series, who this month released The Hammer Horror Collection, which was about 8 movies for 20 bucks. Fantastic.
You know, Lugosi and Karloff made eight movies together, and it almost surprised me that they didn't just decide to make this a Logosi/Karloff collection, taking out "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (the only movie in this collection that doesn't co-star Karloff) and just add the other four in the Lugosi/Karloff series. That would be a collection that I would absolutely love to have: the Lugosi/Karloff series of classic little seen horror movies. That's be just absolutely fantastic. But I really do dig this collection movies that Universal has given us. There's some wise choices here, with the exception of "Black Friday." These aren't some of the more popular movies from Lugosi, but yet they're not the ones that time has completely forgotten. They were looked upon with great awe at their time of release, and now we can go back and revisit them and place them pretty damn high up on his large filmography.
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