When I restarted this site, I said I wasn’t going to do movie reviews here, that I had another place to do that. Well, I changed my mind.
See, the past two years I’ve done A Month of Horror, a series of daily brief reviews covering Horror movies I watched that day. It’s happened almost long enough to be a fun little tradition, and as bad as this year’s been for me, I need a fun little tradition.
So all this month, little capsule reviews. Unlike the previous years, I’m given each a score based on the system I will go back to using on the Review Site when (when!) I start that back up again. Simply put, each film is judge on a two prong basis: Quality (Terrible, Bad, Meh, Good, Great) and Preference (Hate, Dislike, Meh, Like, Love). Each judgement is represented by a number (0.0 through 2.0) and the two numbers are added together for the final score.
Enough nattering. Here’s the reviews.
THE MUMMY (1932)
I went out to a theater to see this one. Not the most ideal viewing experience, as the sound was wonky. Background sounds and music were louder than the dialogue and sometimes things were hard to understand, especially in the beginning. That’ of course, isn’t the film’s fault, but it’s worth pointing out.
Anyways, this was personally viewed as one of the lesser Universal Monster movies before this rewatch. It’s the romance portion; the love-at-first-site trope is a terrible one. Lazy. Unnecessary, in this case.
This watch, though…
In a nutshell, an ancient mummy is revived after centuries and wants to be reunited with his dearly beloved. Unfortunately that dearly beloved happens to be reborn in the body of a pretty young lady who isn’t quite ready for what passes for marriage among the Undead.
All of this is told at a damn fine pace. There’s plot holes galore here and there, but the acting’s fine, the direction’s pretty great to my inexperienced eye, and really, this ain’t lesser anything.
As for the romance… well, let me summarize that in script form:
FRANK: Damn it, Helen, I’ve known you all of three seconds, but I love you! You remind me of a thousand year old corpse I dug up recently!
HELEN: Oh, Frank, you flatterer you! I think I maybe possibly could eventually–
IMHOTEP: [Enters room] I am Ardeth Bey.
HELEN: A MAH-YUN! [proceeds to stare misty eyes at the three century old corpse.]
Seriously, watch Frank fume at this was hilarious. I’d forgotten there was a quasi love triangle here. Plus, they hung a lampshade on how silly it was for Frank to do this. I gave it a pass.
All in all, it’s a good movie (1.5 points) that I liked (1.5 points).
3 out of 4
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1932)
One of the trailers that played incessantly in front of these films was for Scream 2, of all things. In it, the characters get into a debate about sequels. One guy says that there where plenty of good sequels, and a girl character snottily asks him to name one.
This is the correct answer.
This is so much better than the original. And the original wasn’t a slouch.
Quick summary, the monster survives his near death experience from the previous film and now is on the look out for someone to be his friend. Meanwhile his creator is being hounded by a former teacher to make more monsters.
While this has it’s problems (an unnecessary prologue, like the first film, for starters) it runs at a nice pace. Most of the male character try their hand at eating the scenery (Ernset Thesiger beats Colin Clive here) and the female leads aren’t too shabby for what little they get. It really has a glorious ending, and does the fine job of making me regret put off a rewatch.
So to do the point thang again, it’s a great movie (2.0) that I loved (2.0)
4 out of 4
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