Customer Reviews

Fox Horror Classics Collection (The Lodger / Hangover Square / The Undying Monster)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Three little known but effective horror films from a major hollywood studio complete this box set. Last year MGM released some of their little known horror films and now Fox has followed suite.
None of the these titles have been on DVD before, and even rarely on VHS. They occasionally showed up on the lackluster Fox Movie Channel a few years ago at odd hours of the early morning. It was on such an occasion that I encountered "The Lodger". This is a top notch effort which rests comfortably between the Gaslight thriller and the classic horror film. Cregar plays the villain with an off kilter, understated creepiness that was way ahead of it's time and could be called the screen's first serial killer performance.
The cinematography looks better and more atmospheric than what Universal was shoving out in the mid 40s'. Fog bound London streets and dimly gaslit interiors play with the viewers sense of claustrophobia. You almost feel as trapped by the heavy atmosphere as Cregar's character. Lodger is no doubt a lost classic of psychological horror.

I have to disagree with other reviewers that "Undying Monster" is the poor cousin of this set. "Hangover Square" feels more like a re-make of Lodger than a film of its own right. But Undying Monster takes us to the dark, atmospheric Sea coast. The sparse sets and jagged cliffs and caves work beautifully here. We have Jane Eyre meets Bram Stoker. A family curse is the plot engine to drive the lush monochrome cinematography. In fact Undying Monster boasts some of the best shots of the set, particularly the opening interior shot as the moon streams into a tudor drawing room. It looked great on the badly duped VHS copy I've had for years. On DVD it promises to be stunning. The titular Monster is not revealed until near the end, so forget about it and soak up the atmosphere. There is an interesting sequence near the end, all done in long shot as if you were a passerby. It's effective and helps cover the lack of make up talent Fox had for horror films.
These films were rarely seen even back in the days of Late Night Creature Features. Universal's films are better known, and MGM's more highly regarded by critics. But these lost Fox Horror films can now find an audience of their own and be appreciated for the loving cinematography.
If you're tired of the bad Hollywood "horror" films lately, which bear more resemblance to a series of snuff films rather than anything else, this box set is for you. Curl up on your couch with the DVD remote clutched in your hand. Be sure to darken the room, and quiet the mind. The intelligence and atmosphere of these gothic horrors will soon overcome the decades they have sat waiting in Fox's vault to return to the screen.

In the 1930s, the relatively new field of horror cinema was dominated by Universal, with its often wonderful monster movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. As the Universal movies got campier in the 1940s, not many studios really filled the void. Certainly, the best of 1940s horror came from Val Lewton's pictures for RKO (Cat People, The Leopard Man and others). Fox, on the other hand, did not really have a reputation for horror in this era, as is obvious from the Fox Horror Classics set. That's not to say that they are bad movies, just that I don't know if they are really horror.

Besides being Fox movies, the three movies in this set are also tied together by all being directed by John Brahm. First made of these three - and the closest to being a horror movie - is also the weakest in the set: The Undying Monster. The story deals with the isolated Hammond family that is plagued by a curse that has a monster preying on the male Hammonds over the past few generations. This is a pale imitation of two genres made famous by Universal: the monster movie (particularly the Wolf Man) and the mystery movie (particularly the Sherlock Holmes movies, though Fox was actually the first to do the Rathbone movies). The biggest failing of the movie is the fact that the monster is on screen too infrequently.

Much better is The Lodger, a remake of what was Alfred Hitchcock's first suspense movie. Even if you've watched the older version, however, this one is still fun to watch and substantially different, plotwise. Among the big names in the movie are Merle Oberon and George Sanders, but the star is Laird Cregar who plays the title character. Sadly, Cregar's career was very short (less than a decade) because he steals the show in most of his movies (especially in I Wake Up Screaming, part of the Fox Film Noir series). The movie itself deals with Cregar as Jack the Ripper, taking up residence in a rooming house where his fellow residents begin to suspect he may not be fully on the up-and-up.

Best of all is Hangover Square. In a way, it is a reworking of The Lodger to capitalize on that movie's box office success, with Sanders and Cregar both returning in hero and villain roles respectively. Actually, Cregar is not so much evil as sick, driven under stress to take on a second, homicidal personality; in his lucid moments, however, he is a good guy, a musician who falls for bad girl Linda Darnell, my favorite femme fatale from the 1940s (who, like Cregar, would die at a young age under tragic circumstances). Besides Cregar and Darnell, there is also the great music of Bernard Herrmann that is an essential part of the movie.

The Lodger and Hangover Square fit more in the thriller or mystery category than horror, but that doesn't diminish their quality. Overall, The Undying Monster merits a low three stars, The Lodger four and Hangover Square five. Add to that some special features, most notably commentaries on the Cregar movies and some mini-documentaries on Cregar and Brahm, and this set merits a full five stars. It may not really be a horror set, but Fox Horror Classics is a worthwhile collection of some generally obscure movies.

The Fox set of classic films are just great.
The Lodger remake from 44' is awesome and
one of the better Jack the Ripper movies made.
Hangover Square has most of same cast as Lodger
and is more film noir/mystery than horror but
also very well made. Better than most. Undying
Monster was an attempt at making a wolfman movie
but it's more of a mystery movie but again very
well made and acted. I highly recommend this set.

Titling this collection of thrillers from director John Brahm is misleading because only one of the films, "The Undying Monster", has a remotely supernatural element to it. That said, there's much to recommend here because these films are masterfully directed and highly literate. It would behoove the viewer to check this set out and the Val Lewton box set that Warners released a few years back as examples of intelligently made chillers. Two of the films also showcase the prodigious talents of Laird Cregar, who died tragically young. His work here in "The Lodger" and "Hangover Square" are his best work along with his role as a dogged detective in the noir classic, "I Wake Up Screaming".
"The Lodger"-A good film with a superb turn by Cregar as a mysterious pathologist. A lot of creepy atmosphere but the mystery in this Jack the Ripper tale is obvious and telegraphed early on. Four stars.
"Hangover Square"-The best of the three films by far. Cregar gives probably his best performance as the tormented composer with a possible split personality. Brahm perfectly captures the eeriness of turn-of-the-century London. Dynamic Bernard Herrmann score. The ending is a classic. Five stars.
"The Undying Monster"-The weakest entry in the bunch. Even at it's sixty-three minute running time there's a lot of filler. Film concerns a family with a dark secret being investigated by Scotland Yard in the wake of a murder. Intelligent but long-winded. Three stars.

Fox has been taking a play from Warner Home Video on how to package their classics. They've been making a habit of adding commentary and extras to their classics, and this group is no exception. What you have here is two very good classic horror movies from the 1940's and one mediocre one, all newly restored and remastered. "The Undying Monster" is just not that interesting. The movie introduces all of these strange characters, and has you thinking something interesting is going to happen when in the end it is all too ordinary. Horror films that are campy and Ed Wood bad tend to be more satisfying than the ones that are just ordinary. At least that's my opinion. The list of extras for this set keeps appearing and disappearing from the product description, so at this point I'm just listing the Fox Home Video press release for this set. Also, I've listed the rating of each film as given by a popular internet film database. It's been my experience anything above 7/10 is very good and anything above five is OK/mediocre.

Hangover Square (1945) 7.1/10 - Based on the novel by Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square stars Laird Cregar as a composer who suffers from unexplainable blackouts. When he discovers the young attractive woman he has fallen for wants to steal his music, his blackouts may result in murder.
Features include:
Commentary by Film Historian / Screenwriter Steve Haberman and Co-Star Faye Marlowe
Commentary by Richard Schickel
The Tragic Mask: The Laird Cregar Story
Hangover Square Vintage Radio Show - Performed by Vincent Price
Restoration Comparison
Trailer
Advertising Gallery
Still Gallery

The Lodger (1942) 7/10 - Cregar also stars in The Lodger, a tale of a family suffering from financial hardship that offers a room in their home to a mysterious wanderer to help make end's meet. But when suspicious habits come to fruition, they begin to fear this peculiar stranger may in fact be the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper.
Features include:
Commentary by Film Historian s Alain Silver & James Ursini
Man In The Fog: The Making Of The Lodger
The Lodger Vintage Radio Show - Performed by Vincent Price
Restoration Comparison
Trailer
Still Gallery

The Undying Monster (1942) 5.3/10 - An inspector investigates the murderous connection of a werewolf's relentless pursuit of a certain family.
Features include:
Concertos Macabre: The Films Of John Brahm
Restoration Comparison
Trailer
Advertising Gallery
Still Gallery
All titles are presented in Full Screen with English and Spanish audio and English, French and Spanish subtitles.

Hangover Square:
Can Hollywood make an engrossing movie about a murderous schizophrenic who is a big, fleshy sad sack? Director John Brahm, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle and lead actor Laird Cregar come close. The movie has a great title and such an atmospheric turn-of-the-century London look about it -- with plenty of gas lights and foggy night-time streets -- that we almost expect composer George Harvey Bone (Cregar) to walk by Sherlock Holmes as he returns dazed from another murder. The movie also benefits, if that's the word, by the story of Cregar's death. Cregar was a large man, well over 6 feet and often over 300 pounds. With Hangover Square, Cregar saw his chance to escape being cast as a character actor and turn himself into a leading man. In weeks he lost over 100 pounds with the help of amphetamines and a strict diet. Shortly after finishing Hangover Square, he was dead of a heart attack at 28.

Bone is a Victorian-era composer who is subject to blackouts. He puts his chance for serious musical acclaim at risk when he meets the dance hall singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell). He always was something of a weakling, but now he is becoming a sad creature manipulated by a selfish woman. When he learns Netta was simply using him, he has a seizure that leads to a spectacular Guy Fawkes bonfire which leaves Netta done to a crisp. Bone almost welcomes the insistence by Dr. Alex Middleton (George Sanders), a medical man who consults with Scotland Yard, that Bone must turn himself over to the police. But first Bone must play his finished concerto macabre, even as the flames of a burning salon engulf him.

Is this horror? No. Is it sad? Yes. But more than anything, Hangover Square is melodrama...not a bad thing when it's the end-product of the well-greased Hollywood movie-making machine which featured the efficient skills of filmdom's craftsmen. Unfortunately, the movie has no one to really care about. I found myself more upset over the fate of Netta's Siamese cat than I was over the fate of Netta. For those intrigued by Cregar, watch him as the suave devil in Heaven Can Wait (Criterion Collection) (1943); the amusing Sir Francis Chesney in Charley's Aunt (1941) and the obsessed, menacing and tragic Ed Cornell in I Wake Up Screaming (Fox Film Noir) (1941).

The Lodger:
"When the evil is cut out of a beautiful thing, then only the beauty remains."

The quote belongs to Mr. Slade, played by Laird Cregar, who with his scalpel leaves a number of former London dance hall women dripping, beautiful and sprawled dead in the alleys of Victorian London.

This creepy Ripper story delivers the goods. There are no close-ups of gore splashing Slade's face as he slices and extracts. What The Lodger has in abundance is atmosphere...gaslights in the fog at night, glistening wet cobblestones, dark alleyways and shadowed rooftops. It benefits immensely from the sinister black-and-white cinematography of Lucien Ballard. Most of all, it has Laird Cregar as the tormented, hulking Slade. The final scenes as Slade, wounded by a shot from Detective John Warwick's revolver, running in a crouch through the back of the theater where Kitty Langley has just performed, the police after him, his desperate eyes looking for a way out, his jowls quivering in fear and madness, all lit by gaslight, is quite a moment.

Watch The Lodger, then watch Blueprint For Murder / Man In the Attic. Man in the Attic from 1953 is a very close remake of the Lodger, with Jack Palance as Slade. It's instructive to see the differences between movies with the same plot where one is not quite awful and the other is an A movie.

The Undying Monster:
"'Orrible, it were!" cries a wide-eyed, dirty-nailed villager rushing into Hammond Hall. He's just come across the latest results of a mysterious monster that ferociously attacks members of the Hammond family, a line going back 500 years. We're in the tail end of the 19th century in England, and Hammond Hall is a great, stone hulk perched on the cliffs above a tumultuous sea.

When Oliver Hammond is attacked late one night on the cliffs as he tries to protect a young woman who had taken a shortcut, Scotland Yard is brought in. Robert Curtis (James Ellison), a scientifically inclined detective with a cheery air, is determined to find the truth. He has to deal with the well-meaning Oliver Hammond (John Howard), the chilly and beautiful Helga Hammond (Heather Angel), the suspiciously mysterious Dr. Jeff Colbert (Bramwell Fletcher), and the doom-speaking Walton with his hatchet-faced wife, the housekeeper.

The acting ranges from amateurish (James Ellison) to clunky (John Howard, who sports a mustache even more carefully trimmed than Gable's) to carefully hammy (Bramwell Fletcher.) The cliches are all here and presented with sincerity. The enterprise, however, looks just fine, thanks to cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and the movie moves briskly to fill its 63 minutes. Someone even decided to speed up the film to make the monster look quite snappy as he runs along a cliff carrying his latest victim. Still, the overall effect, 65 years later, is one of pleasant indulgence, especially if one has a fondness for or suffers from lycanthropy.

I remember these Fox films from years ago and was delighted that they were finially out on DVD. This is good, solid entertainment with the best of actors. - you will not be disappointed. Perfect for a Friday nite at home, especially if its raining with lightening and thunder - know what I mean? Plan to purchase Vol. 2 when it comes out.

This DVD collection contains 3 films from 20th Century Fox directed by German John Brahm. It would have been better if called the John Brahm Collection because only one of the films is really of the horror genre, the other 2 being psychological thrillers. The package is not as good as it might have been if a greater variety of films had been included.

"The Undying Monster" is a classy B picture with great photography, some excellent sets and a mobile camera worthy of an A. The film betrays its B status with the woeful James Ellison badly miscast as a Scotland Yard forensic expert and a melodramatic plot set in a dark house by the sea. Brahm's direction is very good in the circumstances and there are some good isolated scenes but overall, the effect is a bit corny and the plot development is truncated as befits a B film.

The other films are two book ends starring the enigmatic Laird Cregar. Cregar was a superb character actor with a complex and short life which is described in a very worthwhile documentary included in the package.

"The Lodger" is Brahm's version of Jack the Ripper with a dose of "Phantom of the Opera". Since it is obvious that Cregar plays the Ripper, the film relies on its camera angles, moody lighting and psychological implications for its suspense. Merle Oberon is the leading lady. Oberon was a wooden English actress with a clipped hostess delivery and stylish presence. As usual, she does not project much personality. She performs 2 musical hall numbers, with poor lip-synching, and one famous critic said "Merle Oberon performs the Can Can. Might we call it the Can't Can't" - hilarious but a bit harsh. With the exception of Cregar's towering performance, I find the film strangely detached and uninvolving and a number of the sets are 2 dimensional.

"Hangover Square" is the best film in this package. Cregar was unhappy because the screenplay changed the settings of the novel among other things and it was obvious that Darryl F. Zanuck, never one to miss an opportunity to repeat a success, transformed it into a sequel to "The Lodger" with a dose of "Of Human Bondage". Cregar plays a schizophrenic composer and gives a masterly portrayal. Linda Darnell plays the slut who seduces him and she is very good in her typical artificial way even if she squeals in moments of enthusiasm. She is spectacularly photographed and her beauty was never more lush. The film touches on film noir with the lighting and low slung camera angles and particularly in Darnell's performance.

The prints of the films are very good although I was surprised by an obvious tear in "Hangover Square" and the appearance of a white vertical line at one point. The DVD contains a generous list of extras including trailers, stills and some worthwhile commentaries with the exception of Richard Schickel's pointless commentary on "Hangover Square". Schickel needs a shot of adrenalin. He sounds as if he is half asleep and many of his comments are cursory. Maybe the producers of the DVD realized because "Hangover Square" actually has 2 commentaries and the other one is far superior. Charming Faye Marlowe who had a supporting role in the film speaks to an excellent historian. Her memory is vivid and she adds an unusual personal touch, a rare occurrence with a classic film since most of the participants are usually dead of course.

Overall, the value of this set is in the preservation of Laird Cregar's impressive acting. The rest is secondary.

attn: let's not forget that the HANGOVER SQUARE CONCERTO was composed for this wonderful film by Bernard Herrmann...hello?

THE UNDYING MONSTER is the first horror film I ever saw on TV as a very young boy and helped give me my lifelong appetite for classic horror. The remastered UNDYING MONSTER was the clearest copy I have ever witnessed since that first night well over fifty years ago.

This three-disk collection of classic horror and suspense thrillers from the Fox Studios presents three atmospheric and generally unknown thrillers (e.g., The Lodger, Hangover Square and The Undying Monster) in absolutely beautiful remastered formats. It also pays homage to the directing skills of the very talented John Brahm.

Although this film was made in the Universal tradition, it has many wonderful qualities including an original musical score, excellent cast, good special effects, fine interior and exterior sets and a plot that kept me interested in what happened to the characters. Of course, the make up was not as effective as in almost any of the Universal movies because of the wonderful work of Jack Pierce of that studio. This is attested to by the fact that the appearance of the monster is not even hinted at until the poorly lit but climactic ending. As my first horror movie this film was a magical experience of my youth and the excellent DVD transfer enables me to experience that evening over and over again.