Werewolf of London

#23 in my ranking of the Classic Universal Monster movies. Without James Whale or a solid literary source, it seems like Carl Laemmle really didn't know how to put together a winning monster movie. Using bits and pieces from previous, more successful, efforts Laemmle had produced, he brought in a small host of writers and…

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Blonde

So, I highlighted the trailer. Guess I gotta review it, huh? I saw someone dub this film Marilyn Monroe: Fire Walk With Me, and that's quite apt. It doesn't have the intensity of David Lynch's film about a girl trapped in a nightmare on her way towards her inevitable end, but it is a similar…

Bride of Frankenstein

#3 in my ranking of the Classic Universal Monster movies. This is what every B-movie monster mash wanted to be: a mixture of heady thematic ideas and pure entertainment, but very few ever got it as right as James Whale did in Bride of Frankenstein. Alternatively intelligently advancing the ideas presented in the first Frankenstein…

The Invisible Man

#1 in my ranking of the Classic Universal Monster movies. Carl Laemmle Jr. finally got James Whale to come back to make another horror picture, having tried to get him to direct The Mummy, and Whale ended up making one of the least typical of these early films. It's something between a thriller and a…

The Mummy

#19 in my ranking of the Classic Universal Monster movies. This third entry in the Universal Monster movies, what was at the time a loose collection of films with generally similar plots and tones, is the first that the lead producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. didn't base on some piece of 19th century British literature, leaving…