The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A twelve-chapter serial based on the comic-book superhero who these days is known as Shazam. Often regarded as one of the best of all serials, this has some decent action scenes and cliffhangers
Classic film about a lawyer arguing in court to save a man who has sold his soul to The Devil. On screen, this is turned into a highly entertaining sentimentalised Frank Capra-type film about American greatness
A 1940s good/bad twin psycho-thriller with Albert Dekker as a psychopathic twin escaped from an asylum come back to claim the inheritance taken by his brother
Boris Karloff mad scientist film with a fear of science at the most extreme of any work of this era. What seems absurd is the film’s belief that doom will be brought by a device that is nothing more than an EEG machine
Version of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring Spencer Tracy and with Ingrid Bergman as the dancehall girl he liaises with. This has been made in the vogue for Freudian psychology so the transformation is tricked out with dubious symbolism
One of the classic films from Disney’s Golden Age, a beautiful piece of anthropomorphism in the tale of an ungainly elephant that flies with its oversized ears. Considered controversial in more recent years.
One of the original Hollywood afterlife films of the 1940s light fantasy boom, twice remade, most notedly as Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. Amiable and likeable while avoiding any deeper issues
The fourth of Abbott and Costello’s films, a knockoff of the then recent hit of the Bob Hope remake of The Cat and the Canary involving much comedic running around a supposedly haunted mansion
A low-budget cheapie starring Bela Lugosi as a widower who goes into a trance and starts killing women after having visions of his late wife’s ghost
An overlooked latter day Universal monster movie with Lionel Atwill on wonderfully demented form as a mad scientist who turns Lon Chaney, Jr. into an electrified human dynamo
Mad scientist film in which George Zucco transplants an executed man’s brain into a gorilla’s body whereupon the ape-man proceeds to exact revenge against those who wrongly convicted him
One of the more obscure films in the Disney catalogue. A part live-action, part animated dramatised tour of Disney Studios, showing how the studio runs and screening several animated short pieces
The East Side Kids, a popular comedy group during the 1940s/50s, conduct a variant on the Old Dark House film featuring a sinisterly lurking Bela Lugosi … The East Side Kids’ films were made on impoverished budgets – this one of their better but still aimlessly circles around creaky and dated gags
Fifth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and a thoroughly ordinary run through of the by now well-established formula of the series
Second sequel to Topper , the screwball light fantasy comedy about a dull man who is driven crazy by ghosts only he can see. This throws everything into an Old Dark House setting but proves there is still a good deal of droll, nonsensical humour to be found in the formula
Although it wasn’t the first werewolf film, this is the one the created all the mythology of the werewolf film – full moons, silver bullets etc – while the wolfman went on to join the pantheon of Universal Famous Monsters.