Vintage Horror Classics: Dracula [2 Discs] [O-Card Packaging] (Import)

Editorial Reviews

This enigmatic, artsy horror film from the early 1970's is a lost classic waiting to be rediscovered. The dreamlike storyline echoes elements of Night Of The Living Dead and Carnival Of Souls but manages to chart a surrealistic course all its own, carefully weaving shocks into its hazy mood to build a very personalized sort of nightmare feel. Marianna Hill and Michael Greer offer subtle, nicely stylized performances, both slowly sliding from self-possessed cool into numb fear in a believable style. There are also effective character turns by Elisha Cook, Jr. as a drunk whose ramblings serve as an early warning of the horrors to come and Bennie Robinson's supremely unnerving turn as an otherworldly agent of the evil that infects the film's small-town setting. However, the most distinctive aspect of Messiah Of Evil is its striking visual design: Jack Fisk's production design is dazzling, with the nightmarish pop-art look of the artist's home being the highlight of his work here, and Stephen Katz's crisp widescreen lensing effectively deploys the kind of eerie, primary-colored lighting that genre fans usually associate with Italian horror films. First-time director Willard Huyck (better known for writing scripts for George Lucas with co-writer Gloria Katz) does a fine job of mixing all these distinctive to create a uniquely Californian variant on its gothic horror inspirations. In short, Messiah Of Evil is a macabre little gem and a must for any fan of 1970's horror. ~ Donald Guarisco, Rovi The film that brought one of German cinema's masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of Dracula, even if the Bram Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi Often cited as the cream of the crop among independently produced chillers of the 1930s, The Vampire Bat does indeed pack a wallop. Perhaps no longer able to frighten a modern, so-called more sophisticated audience, Frank Strayer's compact little horror treatise is nevertheless so well cast and produced with such elan as to consistently entertain. The physical trappings are entirely comparable to the Universal horror films of the era -- in fact, filmed on the studio lot, The Vampire Bat benefits from several of the famous standing sets -- and the cast is perhaps even better than what the larger studio would be willing to provide. Lionel Atwill adds yet another of his patented devilishly calculating Mad Doctors and Fay Wray is as comely as ever, even if she doesn't scream a single time. Add to that a young Melvyn Douglas as the male ingenue (a major improvement over Universal's tepid David Manners) and such grand genre perennials as Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Robert Frazer, and Maude Eburne, and there is nary a dull moment. Eburne, incidentally, as Wray's hypochondriac aunt, becomes the subject of one of filmdom's funnier closing lines. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi