Ten years of blogs… My 100 favourite films

To celebrate a decade of this blogging nonsense – my first review was published on 2 April 2014 – here is a list of my 100 favourite films.

The lengthy process to whittle down several hundred contenders was obviously a flawed exercise – totally subjective, unashamedly biased, occasionally based on transitory whims, and somewhat narrow (most movies are American, almost every director is male). I should also point out that these choices are guided by the word ‘favourite’, rather than me worrying about any ‘objective’ greatness or a cinematic canon. They’re just the films I like the most.

So for better or worse, agreement or ridicule, here is what I’ve chosen…

100-51

The list is too unwieldy for a full ranking, so let’s start with the movies that fill the bottom half of the hundred, listed alphabetically, then we’ll dive into a top 50…

The Abyss (1989, James Cameron; above), The Aeronauts (2019, Tom Harper), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg), Alien (1979, Ridley Scott), Alien Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet), All the President’s Men (1976, Alan J Pakula), Batman (1989, Tim Burton), Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott), The Breakfast Club (1985, John Hughes), Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)…

A Christmas Story (1983, Bob Clark; above), Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles), Clear and Present Danger (1994, Phillip Noyce), Commando (1985, Mark L Lester), The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson), The Devil’s Advocate (1997, Taylor Hackford), Election (1999, Alexander Payne), Enemy of the State (1998, Tony Scott), Fargo (1996, Joel Coen), Ghostbusters (1984, Ivan Reitman)…

Ghost World (2001, Terry Zwigoff; above), Gladiator (2000, Ridley Scott), The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola), The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola), GoldenEye (1995, Martin Campbell), Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese), A Hard Day’s Night (1964, Richard Lester), Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg), The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen), Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)…

Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan; above), Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992, Brian Henson), The Omen (1976, Richard Donner), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, Peter Hunt), Patriot Games (1992, Phillip Noyce), Robin Hood (2010, Ridley Scott), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman)…

Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock; above), Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright), Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman), The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill), Superbad (2007, Greg Mottola), The Terminator (1984, James Cameron), Timecode (2000, Mike Figgis), Titanic (1997, James Cameron), Trainspotting (1996, Danny Boyle), True Romance (1993, Tony Scott)

TOP FIFTY

50 – Frog Dreaming (1986, Brian Trenchard-Smith; above)

49 – The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011, Steven Spielberg)

48 – It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)

47 – From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez)

46 – Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)

45 – Hot Fuzz (2007, Edgar Wright; above)

44 – Back to the Future Part III (1990, Robert Zemeckis)

43 – Grosse Pointe Blank (1997, George Armitage)

42 – An American Werewolf in London (1981, John Landis)

41 – Easy A (2010, Will Gluck)

40 – Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino; above)

39 – Unstoppable (2010, Tony Scott) 

38 – Heat (1995, Michael Mann)

37 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg)

36 – JFK (1991, Oliver Stone)

35 – Seven (1995, David Fincher; above)

34 – Return of the Jedi (1983, Richard Marquand)

33 – Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron)

32 – The Usual Suspects (1995, Bryan Singer)

31 – Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, JJ Abrams)

30 – DOA (1988, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel; above)

29 – Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell)

28 – Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

27 – Dial M for Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

26 – E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (1982, Steven Spielberg)

25 – American Beauty (1999, Sam Mendes; above)

24 – The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)

23 – Back to the Future Part II (1989, Robert Zemeckis)

22 – Out of Sight (1998, Steven Soderbergh)

21 – Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)

20 – Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979, Terry Jones; above)

19 – Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan)

18 – Twelve Monkeys (1995, Terry Gilliam)

17 – The Hunt for Red October (1990, John McTiernan)

16 – Aliens (1986, James Cameron)

15 – Asteroid City (2023, Wes Anderson; above)

14 – Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)

13 – Licence to Kill (1989, John Glen)

12 – Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)

11 – A Fish Called Wanda (1988, Charles Crichton)

10 – WarGames (1983, John Badham; above)

9 – Clue (1985, Jonathan Lynn)

8 – Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)

7 – The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner)

6 – Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

5 – Sneakers (1992, Phil Alden Robinson; above)

4 – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986, John Hughes)

3 – Back to the Future (1985, Robert Zemeckis)

2 – Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)

1 – LA Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson; below)

Have I missed out your favourite? Or included something you think is awful?

Let me know in the comments section below…

Black Adam (2022, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A powerful warrior called Teth-Adam is unleashed after 5,000 years of mystical imprisonment and begins to wield his unique form of justice – so a team of superheroes is sent to stop him…

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that, over time, entropy will grow in any self-contained system. In other words, the longer something continues without new impetus, the more it will break down, collapse, fall apart. Metal rusts, organic matter decays, stars burn out. One of the most mind-blowing implications of this is that because the universe itself is a closed system, it too will one day simply stop working. All the activity, energy and dynamic work will even out – a total equilibrium across all of space, which will mean that *nothing* will be able to happen any more. Cosmologists estimate that this will take a while. Perhaps 1.7×10¹⁰⁶ years (that’s 1.7 followed by 106 zeroes).

Superhero movies, however, have taken far less time to reach a stage of flat, listless inertia. After the peak of production and confidence in the days before Covid, the genre has tailed off alarmingly in the 2020s with multiple flops, false starts, fuck-ups and even the shelving of a near-complete movie for tax reasons. And leading the charge into oblivion is Black Adam, which is the 12th entry in the insipid DC Extended Universe series and a quantifiably awful endeavour.

A prologue set in the distant past (‘Before the pyramids,’ a voiceover vagues) tells us the backstory. A young boy in the Middle Eastern country of Kahndaq rebelled against the slavers and, because he accidentally found a chunk of a precious raw material called Eternium, was able to start an uprising. Soon after this, a powerful being dubbed Teth-Adam emerged from the revolution – a folk hero for Kahndaqis for generations to come… We then cut to the modern day. Kahndaq is now run by an organised-crime outfit called Intergang; in an obvious comment on imperialism, they all seem to be thugs with dodgy English accents. Fighting the fight for the oppressed are teenage skateboarder Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) and his archeologist mother, Adrianna (Sarah Shahi). She’s one of those female characters you get in action films who’s strong and tough and independent, so therefore – for some reason – must also be charmless, humourless and lumbered with clunky dialogue such as, ‘I gave up my job at the university and moved four times.’ Her only personality trait is ‘being angry about things’, and Shahi adds absolutely nothing to what’s on the page.

After the kind of haphazard archeology that would make Channel 4’s Time Team wince, Adrianna manages to find and reanimate the ancient hero Teth-Adam (now played by Dwayne Johnson) who’s been interred in a set from Tomb Raider for several centuries. He’s an all-powerful, atavistic meta-human, an unstoppable weapon of mass destruction who’s introduced via a burst of the Rolling Stones classic Paint It Black. In a case of have-your-basbousa-and-eat-it, the script tries to position Teth-Adam as a noble figure, defending his country against the Western oppressors… but it can’t help also childishly revelling in him killing and causing indiscriminate carnage. (The character smashes through walls rather than use the nearby door, which does little to convince us of his intelligence.)

The American authorities are soon worried about the threat of this new murder-machine, so decide to send in a team of superheroes to contain him. But we don’t get the Justice League, we get the Justice *Society*, a second-division team of comic-book also-rans. And rather than establish or embellish these characters properly, the storytelling resorts with leaden laziness to a scene of their leader explaining who they are to his boss, franchise regular Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, appearing on a videoscreen and trying to hide the fact she shot all her stuff in about half an hour).

Long-time fans of the rival Marvel superhero films will find no surprises as Carter Hall (Aldis Hodge) reels off his exposition. He tells Waller that his team includes Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who’s DC’s clone of Ant-Man (except he can only grow big, rather than small)… Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who is DC’s version of X-Men favourite Storm (both can control the wind)… and Doctor Fate (a bemused-looking Pierce Brosnan), who can predict the future, kinda like Marvel’s Doctor Strange. Hall himself, who lives in a mansion eerily like Professor X’s in the X-Men movies, uses the superhero persona Hawkman, who is risibly reminiscent of Marvel hero Falcon. There should be some fun here: some sense of a team bonding or already in full swing, some sense that these characters have lives outside of their superhero costumes. Instead, all we get are a few lightly scattered references that mean nothing to viewers who haven’t read the comics – Henry Winkler cameos as Atom Smasher’s uncle, for example, which will generate a knowing ‘Ahh!’ from connoisseurs but an Alan Partridge shrug from everyone else.

We’re just never given any reason to care about anything – not about Adrianna or Amon, not about Teth-Adam, not about the Justice Society, not about Kahndaq at large. This is a script, for example, where Cyclone’s entire personality and backstory is summed up with one infamously ghastly line of dialogue: ‘The nanobots were injected into my bloodstream by this really messed-up scientist who kidnapped me when I was 15.’ Actor Quintessa Swindell somehow manages to lever this drivel off the page without melting into a pool of embarrassment.

It’s all utterly feckless, it really is. The character development would embarrass a nursery rhyme. The plot is MacGuffin-based nonsense – there’s talk of the Crown of Sabbac, which has been infused with the power of ‘the six demons of the ancient world’ – and the script bandies about words such as ‘prophecy’ rather than reach for any complex storytelling. There are flurries of senseless action, explosions, fireballs and Zack Snyder-style slo-mo. Comedy is dropped into proceedings with the finesse of a waiter plonking a hammer into your bowl of soup. The quality of CGI suggests that the designers spend too much time playing videogames rather than understanding how real objects move in space. And a smug reference to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly misunderstands the entire point of that classic film.

Black Adam is essentially a spin-off from 2019’s Shazam! (Teth-Adam appeared very briefly in that earlier film, while Djimon Hounsou reprises his wizard character here in a cameo). But whereas Shazam! featured some silliness, some pathos and a sense of telling a story, Black Adam is the inverse of entertainment: a movie that seems like it’s being provocative in its sheer determination to be mediocre. It was a passion project for star Dwayne Johnson, who was a producer and had been attached through many, many years of development. However, whereas he’s often a likeable movie presence (Fast Five, Jungle Cruise), here he’s drearily, dogmatically boring. The Rock has as much charm as granite. The movie deserves to be buried under a mountain.

One neo-imperialist enforcer from halfway around the world sent here to steal my country’s natural resources, strip-mine our sacred lands, pollute our waters, oppress our heritage and make us wait in line all day out of 10

Universal Monsters #6: Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Director James Whale initially resisted calls to make a follow-up to his 1931 hit Frankenstein, fearful of going over old ground and keen to move on to more prestigious projects. But when his arm was sufficiently twisted, he ended up producing a masterpiece – a stylish, smart and thrilling concoction of high horror and high camp, which stands as one of the genre’s greatest ever films.

Immediately after the mill fire that climaxed the 1931 movie, we learn that the assembled-from-corpse-parts Creature (Boris Karloff, dialling up the sympathetic quota even more this time) has survived. So too has his creator, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, in one of his final roles before alcoholism got the better of him). Soon, a strange and unnerving new character called Dr Pretorius arrives. He’s a former tutor of Henry’s and is played by the wonderfully effete Ernest Thesiger, an old friend of Whale’s. (The studio had wanted future star Claude Rains.) Pretorius is a far more amoral character – ‘To a new world of gods and monsters,’ he toasts gleefully in a shot destined for pop-culture immortality. He also carries around his own life-form experiments in small glass jars: miniature people, marvellously filmed via trick photography.

In order to further push the ethical boundaries, Pretorius blackmails Henry into building a female creature as a companion for the original. The result is played by British actress Elsa Lanchester. Topped by a Nefertiti-inspired hairdo that became often spoofed, the Bride is one of horror cinema’s most recognisable icons. It’s slightly surprising, then, that she actually only appears in the film’s final four minutes. (Lanchester had popped up earlier, though. She also plays author Mary Shelley in a meta prologue intended to set up the Gothic vibe of the story.)

Elsewhere, there’s true surrealism and theatricality in the way exteriors are achieved on interior sets, such as the dramatic backdrops of brooding clouds creating oppression in the graveyard scenes. In fact, the art direction constantly pushes things into heightened territory, while John J Mescall’s high-contrast, shadow-heavy lighting is extraordinarily artful, taking the tropes of German Expressionism and pointing the way towards film noir. This is not the real world – it’s ambiguous when and where the events are taking place, for example – but a fairy-tale land of burgomasters and peasants and barons and castles, all blended with humour, pathos and the-Creature-as-Christ parallels.

Several decades later, the production of this movie was dramatised in a superb 1998 film called Gods and Monsters, in which we hear Whale (played by Ian McKellen) refers to Bride of Frankenstein as ‘a comedy about death… the trick is not to spoil it for anyone who’s not in on the joke.’ This sly line of dialogue illuminates Bride brilliantly. Neither a relentless horror nor a tongue-in-cheek comedy, the movie expertly combines both. The effect is both bewitching and dazzling.

Ten audiences need something stronger than a pretty little love story (so, why shouldn’t I write of monsters?) out of 10

Next: Dracula is dead, long live his daughter…

Renfield (2023, Chris McKay)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Faithful to the novel? No, this is not a traditional adaptation. We begin at a support-group meeting being held in a sports hall in present-day Louisiana. DRAAG (Dependant Relationships Anonymous Addiction Group) is run by Mark (Ghosts’ Brandon Scott Jones), and most of his clients discuss the ‘monsters’ in their lives – abusive boyfriends and the like. But while they’re talking figuratively, former real-estate lawyer Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) means it. His problem is his boss: the vampire Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage).

Dracula is a centuries-old aristocrat – the Prince of Wallachia, in fact, just like the real-world Vlad the Impaler – and has pale skin, fangs and slicked-back black hair. He’s fond of red capes, top hats and canes; he has enormous strength and powers of hypnotism; he can levitate and morph into a colony of bats. Renfield is the Count’s ‘familiar’, a never-ageing, once-mortal man who is now in his thrall and acts as his factotum. After Dracula is burnt to a crisp during an encounter with a vampire hunter, he needs a place to lie low while he regenerates his body, so the pair hole up in an abandoned hospital in New Orleans. But Renfield’s been feeling increasingly put-upon and undervalued, hence his decision to sign up for a victims’ support group…

Meanwhile, we also meet Rebecca Quincy (a terrific Awkwafina). She’s a lowly New Orleans cop who’s bored with menial tasks such a spot DUI checks: ‘[It’s] just frustrating being on this shit detail when there’s real crimes happening out there,’ she moans. However, Rebecca’s life becomes more exciting when she crosses paths with notorious drug-dealer Tedward Lobo (The Afterparty’s Ben Schwartz) and arrests him with his arms full of cocaine. He’s a member of the family that killed her cop dad, adding extra juice to the situation. Her pursuit of Lobo also leads to an encounter with Renfield, and the pair quickly form a bond – a connection built more on mutual understanding and respect than traditional movie romance.

Spurred on by his new surroundings, his new friend, and the guidance of DRAAG, Renfield then decides to leave Dracula’s employ. He gets himself a new apartment and undergoes a personal makeover – all done as a romcom montage. Things look rosy. However, Dracula, the mobsters and a corrupt cabal within the police force all have other ideas…

Setting: Modern-day New Orleans. We also see flashbacks to Dracula and Renfield a century earlier in Transylvania and London, and an encounter with a bishop and a crossbow-wielding vampire hunter (Miles Doleac). The latter is possibly a take on the book character Van Helsing that’s been influenced by the 2004 Hugh Jackman movie.

Best performance: In the original novel, RN Renfield (we never learn what his initials stand for) is an inmate at Dr Seward’s asylum, a troubled man of mood swings and unpredictable behaviour. He has an obsession with eating insects because he believes this will give him great power – he eventually forms a plan to feed flies to spiders, then the spiders to birds, so he can eat the birds and profit from the accumulated ‘life energy’. (The real-world condition of being obsessed with drinking blood, clinical vampirism, is sometimes called Renfield’s syndrome. The name was coined sarcastically by the psychologist Richard Noll in the 1980s.) But unbeknownst to Seward, Count Dracula targets Renfield and offers him immortality in exchange for devotion – the vampire’s ultimate aim is to use Renfield to get closer to the women in Seward’s life.

The character has had a potted history in film and TV adaptations, being played by a host of actors including Alexander Granach (1922), Dwight Frye (1931), Jack Shepherd (1977), Roland Topor (1979), Tom Waits (1992), Nonso Anozie (2013) and Mark Gatiss (2020) – yet most of these versions twist the character away from the novel’s interpretation. Sometimes he takes Jonathan Harker’s role in the narrative; sometimes he’s met Count Dracula before the story begins. Sometimes he’s a working-class ruffian; sometimes he’s an effete solicitor. Sometimes he’s dimwitted; sometimes he’s educated. Like all the elements in Stoker’s story, Renfield has become a malleable commodity, prime for filmmakers to bend to their purpose.

In the 2023 movie we’re reviewing here, Renfield is played by British actor Nicholas Hoult. This version of the character has superhuman strength, which he gains from eating insects like Tic Tacs, but he’s mostly able to pass for an everyman. We believe him as a lonely, desperate guy who seeks help from a support group and feel for his plight, even when he considers murdering a bus full of cheerleaders to appease his boss. Hoult knows how to pitch the tone so well, making his Renfield semi-comedic (the frustrated voiceover, the panicked expressions) but never losing our sympathy. His chemistry with co-star Awkwafina is also enjoyable.

Best bit: Clips from the 1931 film version of Dracula have been repurposed here to show us the Count and Renfield’s backstory. Sly special effects have been used to drop Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult into the 90-year-old footage, replacing original actors Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye, and Hoult has especial fun aping Frye’s manic performance.

Review: Casting a live wire like Nicolas Cage as Count Dracula is an appealing prospect, and he hams it up enjoyably with a theatrical English accent and not one single toe in reality. (The movie wisely limits his screentime so he doesn’t start to feel overused.) Cage also brings with him a host of Dracula associations. He saw the silent-film masterpiece Nosferatu when he was five years old and modelled some of his vampire on Max Schreck’s extraordinary interpretation from 1922. He starred in 1989 comedy film Vampire’s Kiss, while his brother Christopher Coppola directed a fun slice of shlock in the 80s called Dracula’s Widow and their uncle Francis Ford Coppola directed a famous 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Additionally, and tongue-in-cheek-ily, Cage once had to deny accusations that he himself was a vampire when a man on eBay tried selling an 1880s photograph of a man with a vague similarity to the star.

But as attention-grabbing and fun as Cage’s contribution is, the movie actually succeeds more elsewhere. Renfield works as a raucous, R-rated splatterfest, full of gleeful violence, flamboyant blood splurts, decapitations, crazy shootouts, faces being ripped off, and limbs being ripped off and used as weapons. It’s a funny, punchy film that hums with relentless energy. And it plays as a kind of superhero spoof as we learn about Renfield’s ‘origin story’ and follow him as he struggles to deal with his powers. But most impressively, director Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War) balances all this wackiness with just enough pathos to keep us caring about the characters.

The project was initiated by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, who wanted to attack the Dracula story from a fresh angle – and by focusing on Renfield, the creative team do just that. Stoker’s Renfield is a victim, a passive man manipulated into serving a vampire and betraying the humans who are trying to help him. Nicholas Hoult’s version honours that idea, at least to be begin with – it’s a toxic co-dependancy metaphor, with Dracula as the selfish, controlling half of the relationship and Renfield the oppressed spouse. But as Renfield finds his voice, he grows, he develops and we like him more and more. If not every story beat lands – there’s a clunky mention of Renfield’s wife and child, Rebecca has a sister who’s nothing more than a plot device – the gags, the violence, the performances and the overall sense of Grand Guignol silliness more than make up for it.

Eight oversimplifications of ska’s innovative contributions to music out of 10

Universal Monsters #5: The Invisible Man (1933, James Whale)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

HG Wells’s novel The Invisible Man had been published in 1897 – the same year as Dracula – but Wells was still around in the early 1930s when Frankenstein director James Whale was tasked with this film adaptation. Luckily, Wells enjoyed the result – and it’s easy to see why.

Jack Griffin is a scientist on the run after an experiment went wrong. His body is now totally invisible so he must hide behind clothes, hats, goggles and bandages while he plots how to use his unique situation to his selfish benefit. (This is therefore the second Universal Monsters film in a row with a central character wrapped up in bandages.) Cast as Jack was the London theatre actor Claude Rains. Frankenstein star Colin Clive was initially considered, which makes sense: like Clive’s Henry Frankenstein, Jack is a man ‘playing God’, dabbling in the margins of acceptable science and being driven mad by the untamed consequences. But Griffin is more of an out-and-out villain: a raving, deluded, manipulative murderer. Rains uses his syrupy sinister voice (a result of being gassed in the Great War) to create a memorable character on the edge of lunacy. The impact is all the more impressive given that we only actually *see* the actor, very briefly, in the last scene.

The film’s plot is incredibly basic, being essentially just a set-up followed by scenes of Jack evading the authorities. And it must be said that most of the supporting characters are thunderingly dull. Jack’s girlfriend and her father are played by Gloria Stuart (who 64 years later starred in James Cameron’s Titanic) and Henry Travers (the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life). Neither captures your attention. The film doesn’t really have any sympathy point, in fact – a problem solved in the 2020 remake, which tells its story from a victim’s POV. Instead the fun comes from the intrigue, the visual dynamics and some effective incidental music. There are also many moments of humour, especially when Irish actress Una O’Connor appears as a delightfully camp innkeeper. James Whale knowingly shifts away from the Gothic embellishments of Frankenstein and the result feels closer to a comedy.

The most notable aspect, then and now, is the astonishing special-effects work. The Invisible Man is a 1930s equivalent of Star Wars, Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park – a film where the effects’ power and awe have not dated at all. Whale ekes out the reveal of Jack’s invisibility during the opening act, creating mystery and tension. When his see-through face is first glimpsed (or *not* glimpsed, as it were), we cut away *just* as we realise what we’re seeing (or not seeing). Then when Jack finally unwraps the bandages from his invisible head, it is an extraordinary moment of wonder. How the *hell* have they done that?! Behind the scenes, a succession of techniques were deployed to dramatise the invisibility – hidden wires to move objects in mid-air, complex opticals to merge separately shot elements into one image – and the results are still spectacular after nine decades.

Seven gold vaults of the nations, the secrets of kings, the Holy of Holies out of 10

Next: Frankenstein’s Monster gets… a Bride!

Billy the Kid versus Dracula (1966, William Beaudine)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Faithful to the novel? No, this 1960s B-movie simply uses the title character in a new setting: Count Dracula finds himself in the Wild West!

Dressed in top hat and cape and wearing a Van Dyke beard, Dracula (John Carradine) is aboard a stagecoach as the story begins but doesn’t seem too interested in his chatty fellow passengers. Then a woman boasts about her family’s lucrative silver mine, and Dracula’s interest in piqued. She also shows off a photograph of her daughter, Betty. ‘Eighteen and beautiful?’ purrs the Count when he looks at the miniature. ‘Yes, I would love to see her!’

After arranging the deaths of the woman and the other passengers at the hands of the local Native Americans, Dracula seeks out Betty (Melinda Plowman) and claims to be her uncle, James Underhill, whom she’s never previously met. His plan is to convert Betty into his immortal vampire bride – and take control of the silver mine. But a German woman called Eva (Virginia Christine), who’s also new to the area, suspects his true nature. And this in turn raises the fears of Betty’s fiancé, the former outlaw Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney)…

Setting: A generic, Hollywood-style Old West populated by characters in clothes borrowed from costume stores and white actors dressed up in Pocahontas frills to play Indians. If we were to give the movie a level of respect it doesn’t ask for, the presence of Billy the Kid would mean the story must be taking place circa 1880. The actual Billy, real name Henry McCarty and sometimes known as William H Bonney, was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in July 1881. He was a slight, short 21-year-old when he died – hence the nickname – but is played here by a 35-year-old former stuntman.

Best performance: John Carradine had played Dracula twice before, in Universal Studios’ House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), but was not enamoured with this reprisal. ‘I have worked in a dozen of the greatest, and I have worked in a dozen of the worst,’ he later said. ‘I only regret Billy the Kid versus Dracula.’ This disdain is easy to infer from his listless performance, which uses little more than a wide-eyed stare – sometimes to mean surprise, sometimes terror, sometimes seduction. This Dracula can vanish into thin air (thanks to the oldest editing trick in cinema) and transform into a bat (a puppet dangling on wire). But his chief characteristic is leering over Betty – he’s forever telling his ‘niece’ how pretty she is, which raises an incestuous element that the script does nothing with. (Incidentally, it’s never actually stated within the fiction that this story’s vampire is Count Dracula. That name is never once used, so the film’s title is doing all the heavy lifting here.)

The best of the cast by some distance is character actor Virginia Christine, playing the suspicious Eva. After the death of her daughter (at Dracula’s hand), Eva begins to work for Betty and adopts a protective, motherly role with the young woman. Given the crass tone of the film, Christine does a terrific job of finding and conveying the truth of her character’s plight.

Best bit: Dracula stories usually have a ‘vampire expert’ who can explain things to other characters and the audience – the role is often fulfilled by the book character Van Helsing (or a variation thereof). Here, unusually and pleasingly, the cliché is split between two women. Eva has a knowledge of vampires and the superstitious ways of warding them off. She even visits Betty’s bedroom at night to arrange wolfsbane around the window frames, which echoes how Professor Van Helsing places garlic around Lucy Westenra’s neck in Stoker’s novel. Elsewhere, the local sawbones, Dr Henrietta Hull, is far from spooked by the notion that a vampire might be at large – instead she calmly reads out passages about the creature from her medical dictionary. She later tests whether Mr Underhill is an Undead while he’s carrying an unconscious Betty. Hull holds up a mirror and the reflection is a fun shot as we see an image of Betty seemingly hanging in mid air. A movie with a stronger sense of drama would have had Eva and Dr Hull team up: as it is, they never meet. Dr Hull is played by Olive Carey, the widow of silent-movie star Harry Carey. Their son Harry Carey Jnr, also a successful actor, appears in a small role in Billy the Kid versus Dracula and later had a cameo in Back to the Future Part III.

Review: Director William Beaudine had been working in Hollywood since the silent era – he had been an assistant to director DW Griffith on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance – but is now best remembered, when remembered at all, for crummy B-movies. He had a reputation for shooting swiftly and artlessly.

Originally released as part of a double-feature with Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (another Beaudine quickie), this film was made on a budget and a schedule (just eight days) that would embarrass the word shoestring. The story features a Dracula who has only a cursory similarity to the character from the novel and a Billy the Kid who shares almost nothing in common with the historical figure. It’s all vacuous nonsense, badly acted for the most part and staggeringly simplistic. But there’s also an unpretentious sense of throwaway fun that’s difficult to dislike too much.

Five marks of the vampire out of 10

Universal Monsters #4: The Mummy (1932, Karl Freund)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Given that Dracula and Frankenstein had been such monster hits, so to speak, it’s not surprising that Universal were keen to produce more horror movies. They followed that pair of literary adaptations with another – Murders in the Rue Morgue, based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Released in early 1932, this marvellously Gothic film combined elements of Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein into one role: Bela Lugosi’s Dr Mirakle steals the blood of female victims, but he does this for his immoral scientific experiments, not for sustenance. Today, the marketing team would no doubt pitch all these films as a Universal Monsters Cinematic Universe. In the 1930s, of course, they were just giving cinemagoers what they wanted.

Then came the introduction of another iconic character who would spawn several sequels. As with Frankenstein, 1932’s The Mummy draws from the cast of Dracula. There’s the same screenwriter too and the same title music (a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake), while the director is Dracula cinematographer Karl Freund. Even Bram Stoker himself lurks in the background: The Mummy shares several similarities with his 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars. But there are breaks from the previous format – The Mummy is not a literary adaptation and is the first Universal Monsters film set in what was then the modern day.

The action kicks off at an archaeological dig in Egypt, organised by the British Museum. After an ancient, bandaged mummy is unearthed, its occupant comes to life and escapes, driving one of the dig’s party mad with fear (another wide-eyed role for series regular Dwight Frye). Then, 10 years later, an Egyptian historian called Ardeth Bey offers the archaeologists assistance in finding the lost tomb of the Princess Ankh-esen-amun… Of course, Bey is really the missing mummy, the 3,700-year-old Imhotep, and is played by Boris Karloff. In this dual role, Karloff – credited as ‘Karloff the Uncanny’ after his question-mark billing for Frankenstein – brings some of the same pathos and vulnerability he used in that previous film. Similarly he’s under more fantastic make-up design by the legendary Jack Pierce.

As the story unfolds, Bey develops an obsession with a half-Egyptian woman living in Cairo called Helen Grosvenor, who he realises is the reincarnation of Princess Ankh-esen-amun – and the two clearly have history. Helen is played by the exotic-looking Austrian actress Zita Johann, who was a believer in nonsense such as reincarnation, and the characters’ twisted love-story-across-the-centuries has some heft. Elsewhere, Edward Van Sloan plays his third occult expert in as many films (if these movies were being made today, he’d be literally the same character each time – a Nick Fury of the 1930s).

Visually the film sits somewhere between the flat, stagey Dracula and the boldly expressionistic Frankenstein. Horror moments are played with maximum creep – slow but hold-your-breath – while the lighting is almost proto-noir. What it lacks most is the thrill of a shambling, bandaged mummy stalking innocent victims, as promised by the title. The only scene with a walking mummy is staged obliquely to keep Imhotep out of shot. But as viewers in 1932 would have realised instantly, all this use of archaeology, ancient treasures and evil curses is clearly trading on the Egyptology fad that had blown through Western art and culture since the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Eight sacred spells which protect the soul in its journey to the underworld out of 10

Next: “Claude Rains was the Invisible Man…”

Dracula: The Original Living Vampire (2022, Maximilian Elfeldt)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Faithful to the novel? Yes and no. This low-budget, low-ambition movie was produced by mockbuster specialists The Asylum to (somehow) cash in on the release of mainstream vamp-flop Morbius. It takes some key elements of Stoker’s book, but jumbles them up considerably to tell a far less compelling or interesting story. In an unnamed town near the turn of the 19th century, a killer is targeting young, redheaded women. The deaths bear similarities to other murders from 100 years previously, and at first the police detective assigned to the case, Amelia Van Helsing (Christine Prouty), thinks they must be the work of a copycat…

Amelia has a modern, forensic eye for crime scenes – she can spot clues and deduce what happened like she’s in an episode of CSI. But, ironically given her surname, she has no time for ‘magic and ghosts’. So when her friend the chemist Jonathan Harker (Ryan Woodcock) – who has an interest in the occult and owns a big book called Nosferatu – suggests that the murderer is a vampire, Amelia is slow to agree. Not even the mounting evidence such as a fang marks and blood-letting can sway her.

We also see Amelia’s home life with her girlfriend, Mina Murray (India Davies), who is a trainee solicitor. Mina’s helping an aristocrat called Count Dracula (Jake Herbert) to buy property in the area; she suggests an old abbey on a stretch of land called Carfax. But she doesn’t realise the danger she’s in, because Dracula is not only the murderer but also a vampire. Copying an idea used the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it then turns out that Mina is the spitting-image reincarnation of the Count’s long-lost love, a woman who died on the day of their intended wedding…

Setting: A newspaper held up for the camera in an early scene is dated Monday 18 May 1920, so technically we’re a generation or so on from the setting of Stoker’s book. However, the script, the performances and the art direction all create a more ambiguous timeframe: the film is a mish-mash of 19th-century iconography with 21st-century attitudes. There are plenty of candles, people dress like they’re steampunk cosplayers, and there are no telephones or cars – yet Amelia and Mina have an openly lesbian relationship and suffer no prejudice. The location is similarly indeterminate. The film takes place in a town that could be in central Europe, might be British, but it’s never nailed down. (The film’s production base was Belgrade in Serbia. The characters’ accents vary as much as the actors’ abilities, with English and Canadian the most often heard.)

Best performance: The only star name in the cast list is Michael Ironside, whose CV includes fun roles in movies such as Scanners, Top Gun, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. But whereas he’s usually able to add some sparkle to trashy films – see The Next Karate Kid, Terminator: Salvation and Children of the Corn: Revelation – here he seems less than fully engaged. Playing medical examiner Dr Seward (or ‘See-wud’ as the characters say), Ironside really stinks of show-up-say-the-lines-and-go-home. The only actor who does themselves credit is Ryan Woodcock as Jonathan Harker, who actually feels close to being a real person.

Best bit: There are some decent CG establishing shots of the unnamed town: we see plenty of European architecture with a Gothic castle looming on a headland above the town. The only thing that blights the images is that the streets are always completely deserted. We should also praise the film’s final third, which sees Amelia and Jonathan track down the Count and a kidnapped Mina. After an hour of staid conversations and no plot momentum, at least these scenes feature some action and a bit of tension.

Review: Dracula: The Original Living Vampire has many of the hallmarks of a low-budget horror film:

* A third-rate cast who feel like they’ve had no rehearsal time.

* Limited outdoors filming.

* A distinct lack of background extras. (Other than murder victims, only credited characters appear on screen.)

* Overlong scenes of sex and female nudity, presumably so they can be used in a trailer. (As well as ghoulish shots of naked dead women in crime scenes and on mortuary slabs.)

* Incidental music that’s so unrelenting it just becomes a drone of meaningless nonsense.

* Factual mistakes, which suggest a lack of editorial rigour (18 May 1920 was a Tuesday, not a Monday; Jonathan mentions Interpol, a name that didn’t come into usage until 1956; characters use the term ‘serial killer’, which wasn’t coined until 1974).

* And, most egregiously, a script that has nothing to say. Whatever you think of Bram Stoker’s original novel or the vampire mythology as a whole, they are abundantly productive of allegory and subtext. Dracula: The Original Living Vampire, however, is a stunningly mechanical crime story lacking any kind of theme or narrative complexity.

It’s a horror film that never scares or gets under the skin. It’s a murder-mystery where there’s only one suspect and the audience always knows more than the detective. It’s a procedural plot where the detective gives indignant speeches (‘No more dead women on my watch!’) but never actually does anything to prevent more crimes. Amelia makes no attempt to learn about the victims or search for witnesses or alert the public. She’s generally a dour, humourless and passive character, which in the modern landscape of horror fiction is essentially unforgivable. Two years before this movie was churned out, we were given another gender-flipped Van Helsing in a BBC adaptation of Stoker’s novel. That version chose to make the character clever, charming and compelling, and cast an actress brimming with talent and personality: just two of several thousand reasons why it was better than this disposable claptrap.

Two impossible things out of 10

Universal Monsters #3: Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Having had an enormous hit with Dracula, Universal boss Carl Laemmle Jr then made the profitably obvious move – he commissioned an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein has long been Dracula‘s only true rival as the most influential horror story of the 19th century, so it made sense to repeat the trick. However, as with Tod Browning’s earlier movie, this adaptation plays rather loose with the original book, using simply the central idea of a ‘mad scientist’ who assembles old body parts and creates a new creature. Given the budgetary and production limitations of the era, this scaling down of plot was a wise move: there was no need for the book’s Arctic sequences, university politics and flashbacks within flashbacks.

The fine cast contains some Dracula alumni – Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye, playing very similar types – plus the addition of Colin Clive as scientist Henry Frankenstein, Boris Karloff as the creature he builds, and Mae Clarke as Henry’s fiancée, Elizabeth. British actor Clive is extraordinary, playing his role on the edge of madness, and stretching his excited line ‘It’s alive!’ into about 74 syllables. Clarke, who earlier in 1931 had starred in gangster classic The Public Enemy, has more spirit and spunk than Helen Chandler had managed in the equivalent part in Dracula. And lugubrious Londoner Karloff – enigmatically credited as just ‘?’ – is given one of cinema’s greatest-ever make-up jobs and yet still shines with childlike sympathy. He’s a towering, terrifying ‘monster’ who you feel sorry for. (Dracula star Bela Lugosi turned the part down, offended at being offered a ‘scarecrow’ role. He’d wanted to play Dr Frankenstein.)

The key hire, however, was the director. Universal gave the gig to James Whale, a dapper, canny Englishman with a theatre background and a love of German Expressionism. He resolved to make sure his movie was as visually dynamic and full of atmosphere as possible, and he can be considered its true author. The on-screen writing credits are bewilderingly complex, pointing towards numerous hands at the typewriter, but it was Whale (below) who assembled all the elements and gave them the vital spark of life.

Watching the film today, Frankenstein has lost none of its intoxicating power. The story is straight-forward: Dr Frankenstein, aided by his ghoulish assistant Fritz, steals parts of dead bodies to create an entirely new creature; but the powerful, lumbering man brought to life by a bolt of electricity escapes and accidentally kills a small child, so the outraged locals hunt him down. This plot nimbly weaves around themes of ‘playing God’ and hubris, but never loses sight of the film being a quick-paced chiller for a wide audience. ‘I think it will thrill you,’ as Edward Van Sloan says in an outside-the-fiction prologue. ‘It may shock you. It might even horrify you.’ Meanwhile, the design work is extraordinary, especially the vertical sets that reach for the heavens, and there’s some great use of both sound and silence (there’s very little music). Whale’s masterful control of light and shadow, pace and mood, the spooky and the silly, all results in a gruesome and grisly genre film that pushes towards art.

Ten bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere, out of 10

Next time: We’re off to Egypt, as the Mummy awakens…

Universal Monsters #2: Drácula (1931, George Melford)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon… Here’s part two of my journey…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Made concurrently with the Bela Lugosi-starring Dracula we reviewed last time was this Spanish-language version of the same story. It was produced by Universal Studios for the overseas market – the movie debuted in Cuba – and had to be a newly filmed endeavour because technology did not yet allow for dubbing dialogue. If you wanted characters speaking in a different language, you had to film them doing so. Therefore a separate cast and crew worked on the same sets and locations as the Lugosi movie, often working through the night while the main unit slept. But rather than feel like a knocked-off copy, Drácula – to use its proper Spanish-accented title – is a uniquely impressive film in its own right.

Able to view the daily efforts of the English-language crew before attempting his version of each sequence, and consider what had worked and what hadn’t, director George Melford made innumerable small adjustments. The result is a superior enterprise on almost every level. Scenes have greater tension and drama; story beats are more sharply highlighted or emphasised. Melford’s film is simply more cinematic, rather than the stodgy stage-play hybrid of Tod Browning’s version, and therefore the horror of Conde Drácula’s pursuit of innocent women becomes all the more effective.

This atmosphere of creepiness is borne out of many moments that linger in the memory. Nervous solicitor Renfield (Pablo Alvarez Rubio) is terrified by a magically self-closing door in Castle Drácula. Dr Seward’s house in London is surrounded by a supernatural amount of fog. The scene where Professor Van Helsing (Eduardo Arozamena) outs Drácula as a vampire is marvellously staged, bringing us into the story via smart camera angles and cuts.

Of the cast, Lupita Tovar – a Mexican actress who lived long enough to celebrate this movie’s *85th* anniversary – is especially terrific playing Eva (as Mina has been renamed in this version). She brings sultriness and passion to a role that, in the English-language film, is bland and staid. As wonderful as Bram Stoker’s novel is, female characters were far from his strong point, so Tovar’s ability to inject some life – while reciting more or less the same lines as the cardboard Helen Chandler – is very welcome. Carlos Villarías, meanwhile, playing Conde Drácula, tends to ham-smile his way through the movie but there’s true menace when Melford gives him an extreme close-up. Perhaps one day, some wag will create a supercut of the two films – the macabre mise-en-scene and spooky stylings of Drácula, but with the more familiar Lugosi CGI’d in as the vampire. That’d translate into any language in the world.

Eight bats out of 10

Previous review: I appraised this film in 2019, as part of my Dracula blogging project.

Next: Frankenstein is alive!