Watch The Bela Lugosi Collection Online
Lundi, août 16th, 2010 |
Watch The Bela Lugosi Collection Online.
Movie Title: The Bela Lugosi Collection The Bela Lugosi Collection is available for streaming or downloading. |
I have enjoyed the well-priced Universal Legacy Collections featuring their classic monster films of the 30s and 40s and have been waiting and hoping for them to release the balance of their classic horror titles. This DVD collection is the one I have been wishing for. Now I will finally have two of my favorite horror films of the 1930s, “The Black Cat” and “The Raven,” on DVD.
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As much as I am delighted by this set I find it an interesting and somewhat sad chronicle of Lugosi’s early film career. The disc features an early 30s film following his success in “Dracula” where he is the main star (”Murders in the Rue Morgue” 1932), two films which team him in a role of equal stature with his rival, Boris Karloff (”The Black Cat” and “The Raven,” 1934 and 35 respectively), a film which exploited the marquee value of his name but gave him a more minor role (”The Invisible Ray” 1937), and, finally, a film which saw him slip into a rather demeaning supporting role (”Black Friday” 1940) beside his old equal, Karloff.
Within eight years Lugosi had gone from full-fledged leading man to supporting actor. It must have compounded matters for Lugosi to have Karloff continue to receive leading roles while he was reduced to small supporting roles in Karloff’s films. The duo would work again in 1945 in RKO’s “The Body Snatchers” where Lugosi, again, played a minor role opposite Karloff’s much meatier portrayal. Lugosi’s career was on a steady downward slide by this point (with few exceptions like “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”) and would continue to decline through the next decade until his death in the mid-1950s.
Buy,Download, Or Stream The Bela Lugosi Collection! Click Here
The best part of this collection are the earliest films (pre-1937) which represent Universal’s golden age of horror. This era saw the original “Dracula” (1931), “Frankenstein” (1931), “The Invisible Man” (1933), and Universal’s masterpiece “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). In the early 30s Universal was a studio committed to making quality horror films. In fact, these horror films saved Universal from certain bankruptcy in the dark days of the Great Depression (Abbott and Costello and Deanna Durbin would do the same for the studio ten years later). With the support of Carl Leammle, Jr. they produced A films with good scripts, good directors (Tod Browning, James Whale, etc.), moody sets and photography, amazing makeup by Jack Pierce, and wonderful casts.
As mentioned earlier, “The Black Cat” and “The Raven” are the two films I will enjoy most on this set and they alone are well worth the $20 dollar price tag. Both films take their titles from the works of Edgar Allen Poe but, unlike “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that is where the connection ends. “The Black Cat” is a pre-code tale of revenge and Satanism set in a spectacular art deco mansion built on the site of a bloody World War I battlefield. Lugosi and Karloff are bitter enemies who meet for one final battle of wits. “The Raven” sees Lugosi as a demented, Poe loving, plastic surgeon who disfigures Karloff and blackmails him into aiding him in a plot to punish a woman who has scorned him. Both films are perfect vehicles for their two stars and represent the well-mounted, quality horror product Universal became famous for.
These represent the Universal films outside the “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” franchises that starred Bela Lugosi–or more accurately, Karloff and Lugosi in all but one. Once Karloff entered the Universal scene a few months after “Dracula” (1931) and created such a hit with the Frankenstein monster–eclipsing Lugosi’s Dracula, the studio wasn’t keen to feature Lugosi as their horror star any longer: very ungrateful of them. So it leaves a “Lugosi Collection” from Universal largely as pairings with Karloff. “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1932) is exclusively a Lugosi vehicle. In “The Black Cat” (1934), the two are matched. Lugosi dominates in “The Raven” (1935), while “The Invisible Ray” (1936) is more a Karloff vehicle. “Black Friday’ (1940), by far the weakest film, shouldn’t be here at all, as Lugosi only has a small role.
Since others have already spoken at length about the films, and since most people buying this two-sided disc know what they’re getting, I want to address the DVD mastering problems experienced. Many have noted that, regardless of player, films on the disc pixelate and freeze at random points. This is a problem with Universal’s DVD-18 mastering process, which has flaws that have since caused Universal to return to their earlier, more reliable DVD-9 process.
In the meantime, both this disc and the 2-DVD “The Hammer Horror Series” have more than their share of bad discs. Contacting Universal itself will serve no purpose: even though they are aware of the problem, the pressings are out there and are not being remastered. You just have to be persistent and keep exchanging defective copies at retailers–even if you have to get a refund and start again with another dealer; the films are worth it. Eventually, you *will* get one without glitches. It took me three copies from two places for both this and “The Hammer Horror Series.” Importantly, you don’t have to play through all the films in real time to know if you have a flawed copy: just scan through the films in the player at 4x-10x speed (no faster), and if there is a glitch, the player will freeze at the spot. That way, you don’t have to watch through eight 90-minute movies on every copy you try out; it will take only 10% of the time to check the set, and you don’t even have to be in the room. If you come back and the image is frozen, rather than having finished the film being scanned and having returned to the menu, then you have a bad one.
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