Author’s note, July 2016: I cannot begin to say what bug I had up my ass when I reviewed this film seven years ago, but I completely reject this review. The film is a charming trifle with enormous historical interest and more stylistic value than I came close to giving it; perhaps lingering anger that […]
The first five animated features produced by the Disney Studios between 1937 and 1942 represent a level of sustained artistic achievement virtually unheard of elsewhere in cinema history. Pixar Animation Studios has a good shot at replicating the feat if they keep up their current level for just a couple more years, but outside of […]
In 1941, the fate of the Disney Studios rested upon a single film, for the second time in four years. The one-two punch of Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of them costing astronomical sums and both of them crashing and burning at the box office, had left the company teetering right on the edge of bankruptcy. […]
After the miserable artistic failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn’t much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for […]
I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio’s two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must […]
Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel […]
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what desperation looks like. By 1943, the steam was mostly out of the second phase of Universal horror movies, even in their new cheaper, B-picture incarnation, and if the cycle was going to keep on going, something bold and splashy had to be done, for then as now movies made […]
Along comes World War II, and all of a sudden you can’t sink too much time and effort and especially money into making a movie anymore; certainly not an epic-scale monster movie. And thus it was was that 1941’s The Wolf Man, though itself a film riddled with small signs of cheapness, would be the […]
