Fox Horror Classics Collection (1944)

Three Gothic Masterpieces From Director John Brahm

I've always enjoyed watching gothic horror. Large, spooky houses, swirling fog, unsolved murders, and killers creeping through the dark excite me. The "Fox Horror Classics" is a collection of gothic horror masterpieces directed by legendary director John Brahm. There are three horror movies presented on three discs, each one loaded with extras. I have reviewed each one according to the year in which it was released.

The Undying Monster (1942) ***

It's a shame, but "The Undying Monster" had a lot of potential to be more than it was. However, at a length of only sixty three minutes, it left me unfulfilled. The body count could have been much higher. Maybe, because of the censors, the violence was kept to a minimum. Several maids, a butler, and a couple of poachers could have possibly met gruesome fates at the hands of the monster. Everything else was there to make "The Undying Monster" a great gothic horror masterpiece: the enormous, gloomy mansion by the raging sea, swirling mists, steep, craggy cliffs, and a horrifying family secret involving Satan worship and a burial crypt. The acting was great. Unfortunately, the two romantic leads, played by James Ellison and Heather Angel, never united at the end. This feature is for diehard fans of lycanthropy.

The Lodger (1944) ****

"The Lodger" has been haled as one of the greatest horror movies of the 1940s, and I can understand why. A gothic period piece, "The Lodger" is set in 1888 when the notorious Jack the Ripper is killing actresses in White Chapel. Because of the censors, the word "prostitute" wasn't allowed. This is a great variation on the Jack the Ripper legend. A family allows a young doctor to move in, not suspecting that he is the notorious serial killer. Laird Cregar delivers an excellent performance as Slade, the pre-"Psycho," sex-obsessed maniac who is depicted as a monster in movie posters and bares a striking resemblance to a vampire. The director liked Cregar's performance so much that he gave him the lead in "Hangover Square," where he plays a similar character. If you enjoy gothic horror and the mystique of Jack the Ripper, you will definitely want to see this feature.

Hangover Square (1945) *****

"Hangover Square" is my type of horror movie. Another gothic masterpiece, this one is set in 1912 and has a good body count with more graphic, unique death sequences. Victims are stabbed and strangled and set afire. One lying, deceitful villainous (played by Linda Darnell) is strangled and then placed on top of an enormous bonfire. Again Laird Cregar delivers an excellent performance as another psychotic. This time he is composer George Harvey Brown who suffers from amnesia. He murders during these "spells." The ending is one of the saddest, most disturbing I've ever seen because one can't help but feel sympathy towards the pathetic, abused Brown. This is a must see for fans of gothic slasher horror.

Overall, the "Fox Horror Classics" is a great addition to anyone's collection of gothic horror. While watching it, you will learn how director John Brahm influenced horror cinema. Numerous imitations of his movies have been made over the years. I only wish these features had been presented in color and widescreen format. In this way, they would have been more like the Hammer productions which I greatly cherish. May 28, 2008

Neglected gaslit noir

Really excellent visit to two rather obscure Fox "A" pieces that seldom seem to make it to tv, at least before this release.
HANGOVER and THE LODGER aren't really horror movies in the usual sense, but Gay 90's melodramas with big over-the-top, hambone performances from Cregar at their center. HANGOVER has a great score by Herrmann which reportedly was the inspiration for Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD.
I really liked both of them, but had a real fondness for HANGOVER. I saw them tv in the 60s and always wanted to catch them again. Cinemax showed the both in the 80s, but they have been little seen since. The fox movie network showed LODGER a couple of times, but I requested HANGOVER a million times and came up with nothing.
Presentation is superior. Picture quality is fine, and there's supposed to be a stereo makeover, but you'd never notice it. The commentaries for both are excellent and are done by people who like and understand the films, a rare occasion, these days.
The third film is of little interest except it shares the same director. It's old dark house junk, not worthy of inclusion, otherwise.
Calling them "horror classics" is a misnomer for sure. The two major titles would fit as noirs as easily as anything; dark, black and white, psychotic people doing wacko stuff. Recommended. April 5, 2008

The Undying Monster created a life-long fan of classic Horror!

THE UNDYING MONSTER is the first horror film I ever saw on TV as a very young boy and helped give me my lifelong appetite for classic horror. The remastered UNDYING MONSTER was the clearest copy I have ever witnessed since that first night well over fifty years ago.

This three-disk collection of classic horror and suspense thrillers from the Fox Studios presents three atmospheric and generally unknown thrillers (e.g., The Lodger, Hangover Square and The Undying Monster) in absolutely beautiful remastered formats. It also pays homage to the directing skills of the very talented John Brahm.

Although this film was made in the Universal tradition, it has many wonderful qualities including an original musical score, excellent cast, good special effects, fine interior and exterior sets and a plot that kept me interested in what happened to the characters. Of course, the make up was not as effective as in almost any of the Universal movies because of the wonderful work of Jack Pierce of that studio. This is attested to by the fact that the appearance of the monster is not even hinted at until the poorly lit but climactic ending. As my first horror movie this film was a magical experience of my youth and the excellent DVD transfer enables me to experience that evening over and over again.
February 22, 2008

Beware the still photos/ad art galleries!!!

Although in most ways these are classy DVD presentations, I did encounter an exasperating technical problem when I got to the still photo/ad art galleries. You're instructed to use the right skip/left skip buttons on your remote to move forward or backward through the images, but when I repeatedly pressed those buttons a slashed red O flashed on screen, indicating that I was requesting an impossible function! On a hunch, I tried the same thing with the special features disc of Fox's "Fly Collection"; same result! (I should add that I e-mailed Fox Home Entertainment about all this, but - predictably - they didn't bother to respond.) If anyone out there has found a way around this problem, let me know! January 8, 2008

Horrors?

In the 1930s, the relatively new field of horror cinema was dominated by Universal, with its often wonderful monster movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. As the Universal movies got campier in the 1940s, not many studios really filled the void. Certainly, the best of 1940s horror came from Val Lewton's pictures for RKO (Cat People, The Leopard Man and others). Fox, on the other hand, did not really have a reputation for horror in this era, as is obvious from the Fox Horror Classics set. That's not to say that they are bad movies, just that I don't know if they are really horror.

Besides being Fox movies, the three movies in this set are also tied together by all being directed by John Brahm. First made of these three - and the closest to being a horror movie - is also the weakest in the set: The Undying Monster. The story deals with the isolated Hammond family that is plagued by a curse that has a monster preying on the male Hammonds over the past few generations. This is a pale imitation of two genres made famous by Universal: the monster movie (particularly the Wolf Man) and the mystery movie (particularly the Sherlock Holmes movies, though Fox was actually the first to do the Rathbone movies). The biggest failing of the movie is the fact that the monster is on screen too infrequently.

Much better is The Lodger, a remake of what was Alfred Hitchcock's first suspense movie. Even if you've watched the older version, however, this one is still fun to watch and substantially different, plotwise. Among the big names in the movie are Merle Oberon and George Sanders, but the star is Laird Cregar who plays the title character. Sadly, Cregar's career was very short (less than a decade) because he steals the show in most of his movies (especially in I Wake Up Screaming, part of the Fox Film Noir series). The movie itself deals with Cregar as Jack the Ripper, taking up residence in a rooming house where his fellow residents begin to suspect he may not be fully on the up-and-up.

Best of all is Hangover Square. In a way, it is a reworking of The Lodger to capitalize on that movie's box office success, with Sanders and Cregar both returning in hero and villain roles respectively. Actually, Cregar is not so much evil as sick, driven under stress to take on a second, homicidal personality; in his lucid moments, however, he is a good guy, a musician who falls for bad girl Linda Darnell, my favorite femme fatale from the 1940s (who, like Cregar, would die at a young age under tragic circumstances). Besides Cregar and Darnell, there is also the great music of Bernard Herrmann that is an essential part of the movie.

The Lodger and Hangover Square fit more in the thriller or mystery category than horror, but that doesn't diminish their quality. Overall, The Undying Monster merits a low three stars, The Lodger four and Hangover Square five. Add to that some special features, most notably commentaries on the Cregar movies and some mini-documentaries on Cregar and Brahm, and this set merits a full five stars. It may not really be a horror set, but Fox Horror Classics is a worthwhile collection of some generally obscure movies.
December 23, 2007

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