Icons of Horror - Boris Karloff (1935)

Avoid it

-- There is'nt so much horror in this so called horror collection. Apart from the first film, The Black Room, a romance with a slight gothic tone, the rest is slow and dull.
The Boogie Man Will Get You, is perhaps the worst Karloff movie. A comedy with nothing amusing whatsoever (and less horror).
-- If you're looking for Boris Karloff in his horror movies, you'd better buy The Boris Karloff Collection (Tower of London / The Black Castle / The Climax / The Strange Door / Night Key) from Universal.
-- As usual, these Columbia/Sony DVD have good image and sound quality. August 27, 2008

Compliments for Amazon

My compliments and thanks to Amazon to provide your DVD assortment with such a lot of Karloff titles. I don't understand that in Europe only a handful of Karloff titles are available. Also this Karloff DVD box set is again a rich addition to my Karloff collection. Boris Karloff is the biggest horror icon of the 20st century and as far as I'm concerned, even for the 21st century. I enjoy every film that was made with him and I regret that in Europe there is hardly any attention for the works of this great talented, most respectable and versatile actor. April 10, 2008

very bad quality. Not to get! 3 stars for all films together alone.

The 3 stars I have given this Icons of Horror - Boris Karloff (The Boogie Man Will Get You/The Black Room/The Man They Could Not Hang/Before I Hang)are only for the films, which I must say, despite having Karloff as the lead and supporting role, are not the best of his work. I would give half a star to The boogie man will get you, 1 star to the black room, half a star to the man they could not hang, and a formidable one star to the so called classic Before I hang. 3 stars in total for all the movies put together. And if quality were thrown in, I would bring it down to 1 and a half stars. Boogie man constantly goes black and pauses. Black Room is exactly as it says, the entire picture is full of specks and lines, and is so dark it could almost be seen as a black screen. Man they could not hang is the man I could not hear, literally no sound except hissing of the actual film and short mumbling when people are yelling. And finally Before I hang is generally awful. There is actually no voices, but there is music as if it was a silent film.


DO NOT GET THIS ITEM! For much better quality and acting from Karloff the Uncanny get The Boris Karloff Collection (Tower of London / The Black Castle / The Climax / The Strange Door / Night Key)

or the even better The Bela Lugosi Collection (Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Black Cat / The Raven / The Invisible Ray / Black Friday), with Karloff in lead for most of them. March 7, 2008

Karloff The Uncanny

Sets like "Icons of Horror Collection - Boris Karloff" are greatly appreciated for fans of underappreciated actors like Boris Karloff; however, certain films like "The Black Room" (1935) deserve its own release with extras, some extras, anything. This barren release is so meager in its extras that there are no trailers, no separate screens for chapters and the menus do not even have images (analogous to the "Yellowbeard" (1983) release). Thank goodness the films look good.

The Black Room (1935: ***½/****): When Boris Karloff was given an acting challenge, even in the confines of his stereotypical genre of horror, he could deliver quite well. In "The Black Room" he gets to display his talents in performing the role of two twins, one good (Anton the younger who is partially a cripple) and one evil (Gregor the older twin). As part of a prophecy, the younger brother was destined to kill the older brother in the Black Room - a room previously used for torture and disposing of the family's enemies in the past. The father of the twins decides to seal off the room to prevent any access to the room.

As time has passed, Anton moved away in fear of the prophecy and Baron Gregor has become a despised tyrant in his little fiefdom. Gregor decides to murder his brother and take over his identity to trick and pacify the peasants, marry a lovely lady who thinks he is his brother and to prevent his brother from killing him. He has fooled every person; however, something is amiss.

The direction of Roy William Neill (directed several of the Sherlock Holmes movies as well "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" (1943)) is quite fluid and helps the pace of the film quite much. However, his use of mise-en-scène is sometimes derivative (homage?) of James Whale's Frankenstein with his placement of graveyard crosses and village scenes. The camera movement is much more dynamic than much of the boilerplate horror of its time and especially the 40s horror cinema. The sets are just wonderful to behold.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939: **½/****): The first of the four misunderstood "Mad Doctor" films Boris Karloff did for Columbia (the others are The Man With Nine Lives (1940), Before I Hang (1940) and The Devil Commands (1941). I have seen three of the four and the plot and premise vary little with the variance being the specific knowledge The Doctor has that no one else can duplicate and the commonality is almost everything else (in many aspects these films are almost carbon copies of each other). In this movie he plays Dr. Henryk Savaard, a scientific genius who has created a glass mechanical heart that can be used with surgery to eliminate the need for a heartbeat to help do complicated surgery. When he experiments on one of his workers, it goes awry and Savaard is considered responsible for the death and sentenced to be hanged. His death will not stop him from exacting revenge on the judge and jury that sought out his execution.

Boris is the consummate conflicted doctor who is not evil, just possessed by exterior forces to commit atrocities. Too much similarity between the other films makes it feel almost boilerplate, even though the film is fun.

Before I Hang (1939: **½/****): The third in the four of misconstrued "Mad Doctor" Boris Karloff movies by myopic misanthropes. In this film Boris plays Dr. John Garth a Kevorkian-type character who has been sentenced to hang for a mercy killing. The "system" is quite lenient in that he is allowed to continue his research to solve the ravages of age until his death date (a few weeks later, the death penalty sentencing must have been much faster then ). Since he is expecting his demise after the hanging, he injects a serum mixed with a serial killer's blood into his body and after the execution he is to be subject to further experimentation. However, at the last moment he is given reprieve. Mixing serial killer body parts (or blood) never mixes well for the recipient and the populace at large.

This is probably one of the least interesting of this series with even-less focus on secondary characters (especially the daughter and assistant characters which are much more prevalent in the other films) with the notable exception of Pedro de Cordoba (who played the "living skeleton" Bones in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942)) who plays an aristocrat quite well as well as he seems to be doing the actual piano playing for his scenes.

Boris Karloff is good, even if he is redoing the same role over and over. I like the aspect of the character who does evil, but is not. This movie has this semi-typical theme that has been done most effectively in "The Wolf Man" (1941) and "Hangover Square" (1945). Some scenes seemed to influence the later (superior) The Haunted Strangler (1958).

The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942: ***/****): Here is an early comedic/horror spoof on the Mad Doctor genre with the consummate Mad Doctor himself Boris Karloff. He is trying to create a super-race of superman; unfortunately, the experimental subjects keep dropping dead. He has an additional problem of owing lots of money to the local lender/sheriff/coroner/many more jobs (Peter Lorre) who takes his Siamese kitten wherever he goes. Luckily for Karloff this is solved by a nutty young lady (Jean Marie Donnell) who offers to buy the decrepit house so she can create an inn though there is a caveat that the Doctor gets to keep working on his experiments until he finishes them along with keeping his elder companions: an elder lady who wants chickens and an elder man who is quite proud of his pigs.

Add a traveling dance choreographer, a jealous ex-husband of the nutty young lady and a couple of unexplained murders (besides the bodies in the basement) and then the plot starts to get interesting.

This film has the second pairing of Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff (the first is "You'll Find Out" which also has Bela Lugosi and the movie is not on DVD nor laserdisc and they would not be paired in a film until 1963's "The Raven") and the two act so well together that you wish everyone else was as devilishly delightful as this pair. If more time had been spent on making this film, fixing dropped plot points, better ending (except for a great line by Lorre) then this film could have been a brilliant parody. However, it is still a fun film that will please fans of Karloff and Lorre though might disappoint others. I enjoyed it -- well that is all that matters.

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February 25, 2008

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