Blog Posts

Bela Lugosi has certainly had his share of collections and box sets hitting the stands, but now, belatedly, Boris Karloff has some sets of his own, and we’re not talking cheap public domain films from late in his career.

Universal, where Karloff became a star with Frankenstein, has released, as part of their Franchise Collection, The Boris Karloff Collection. There are five films here: Night Key (1937), Tower of London (1939), The Climax (1944), The Strange Door (1951) and...The Black Castle (1952). Welcome as these films are to DVD, they are, generally speaking, far from being among Karloff’s most memorable films. But that is largely because his biggest Universal pictures have already appeared either in the Frankenstein or Lugosi collections. These aren’t really horror movies, either. Most are period pieces, with Karloff playing secondary roles. He’s the primary antagonist in The Climax, though, which is a Phantom of the Opera variation sans make-up. The standout is Tower of London, where Karloff is the clubfooted, murderous servant of Basil Rathbone’s even more murderous Richard III.

The next time someone talks about The Sixth Sense having an original twist ending, sit them down and force them to watch Carnival of Souls (1962).

Spoiler warning. If you haven’t seen either of these films, or generally have no idea what I’m talking about, stop reading now. Go away. Come back next week. You don’t want to be hear. God knows, I might spoil the twist in The Crying Game while I’m at it.

Greatness can be aspired to. Its achievement can be the driving goal behind a film. But its realization comes down so often to the kinds of intangibles that frustrate efforts to control or create. And this applies to greatness whether the work is good or not. That’s right, today, we’re musing about greatness in the negative (but therefore curiously positive sense): the films that are so bad they’re great.

I don’t think anything more clearly illustrates the difficulty in reaching this special kind of greatne...s than the case of Uwe Boll. There is no doubt that his films are staggeringly bad. The man’s dogged determination to continue pumping out product and foisting it on a unwilling world is testament to just the kind of boneheaded commitment required of the artiste maudit. He even shows a willingness to experiment (ill-advisedly) with the form, and he inspires the worst in otherwise talented casts and writers. And let us pause for a moment at the recent spectacle of his literal boxing matches with his critics. You have to admire that. There’s even a consistency to his body of work, in that it consists of the demolition of one video game after another: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, the forthcoming Dungeon Siege and Postal.