Reviews

  • Bhowani Junction (1956)

    Bhowani Junction (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Considering that classic Hollywood’s legacy in grappling with colonialism is so uniformly terrible, I’m tempted to be lenient with any film that even nods toward being aware of the issues even if they end up upholding it. Bhowani Junction is based on a novel in which a dark-skinned English woman living in an India on the cusp of independence finds herself attracted to three men of different ethnic backgrounds — an ideal opportunity to study the relationship between colonizers and colonized. But 1956 was still awfully close to 1947’s independence, and the historical perspective wasn’t there yet. While the novel sees the mixed-race heroine marry a man of similar ethnic origins, the movie features Ava Gardner (dark-haired, but definitely not dark-skinned) and pairs her off with the pure-English military officer. So, there goes Hollywood. Nonetheless, Bhowani Junction does show early signs of being conversant with tough issues, and should be partially excused in still going farther than most other films of the time. (As a side note, I notice with some amusement the “three suitors” universal plot device combining romantic and thematic concerns, also used in films as diverse as Great Britain’s Far from the Madding Crowd and French Canada’s Maria Chapdelaine.)  Alas, the execution of the film is more harmful than its misguided conclusions—while the plot summary of the film feels exciting and something that could be re-used as a framework for a much more modern film, the limp execution is deadened by typical 1950s studio characteristics—staid camerawork, unconvincing stage work, mannered acting in a very affected style, and garish colours. Few of these are issues for most Hollywood productions of the time, but in tacking topics like those in Bhowani Junction, which demands outdoors shooting and more realistic filmmaking techniques, the limits of the artifice become far too obvious too often. As a result, it feels like a clunker today — thematically and cinematically, even if the plotting and Gardner’s performance have their appeal. Some things age well and others don’t.

  • Killer Party (1986)

    Killer Party (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) At first glance, Killer Party looks like one of those generic slashers that so polluted the cinema of the 1980s. Set on a campus with the usual assortment of coeds, it feels like a generic product out of the gate. Never mind the twisty openings and sure, there are dark initiation rituals and warnings against the occult but, as we know, all of those are really cover for a knife-wielding psycho, right? Well, if you manage to make it through two thirds of Killer Party without giving up in over-familiarity, the film eventually becomes something slightly more interesting, featuring demonic possession to go with the sudden succession of student deaths to make up for the film’s slow burn. Noticeably more self-aware and comedic than other similar films (albeit without quite crossing over into comedy), Killer Party ends up being slightly better than most of its contemporaries. Not by much, and not enough to make this a must watch, but certainly not quite as awful as was the norm at the time. I quite liked Sherry Willis-Burch’s character—which is important, considering the darkly amusing finale—but Joanna Johnson does have a more complex role than usual for horror films of the time. If I had the patience (or a basic liking of the genre), I’d probably find links between Killer Party and the similarly self-aware April’s Fool (or Midnight Showing) as mild examples of how the slasher genre wasn’t without a capacity for self-parody and critique by the mid-1980s. But since I generally loathe slashers and would probably make a mush of what I’ve seen (with no intention of re-watching them to double-check my notes), you’ll have to read it from someone else. In the meantime, even I can say: Killer Party, better than anticipated.

  • Deadgirl (2008)

    Deadgirl (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) The zombie subgenre has grown so degenerate, repetitive and overdone as to feel boring. But once in a while, a film comes along to unnerve audiences and whatever its problems are, you can’t deny that Deadgirl is an uncomfortable experience. It starts as two teenagers discover a zombie girl chained in the basement of a nearby abandoned asylum. Since this isn’t a PG family comedy, one of the two teens’ first thought is to use her as a sex slave. Our protagonist isn’t sold on the idea, but his friend definitely is, and the situation gets more complex as more people are brought into the secret. It gets gorier, raunchier and more disturbing by the moment — the film’s R rating is justified by “strong aberrant sexuality” and the MPAA is not kidding about this one. Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel aren’t interested in comfort or decency. As a result, I have a hard time imagining anyone calling this fun or even a good film — but in a saturated subgenre with fewer and fewer original ideas (as evidenced by its juxtaposition to subgenre films during a zombie horror marathon), Deadgirl stands out as a particularly provocative zombie horror film and one that viewers will have a hard time forgetting, like trauma.

  • France société anonyme [France incorporated] (1974)

    France société anonyme [France incorporated] (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There are times where, upon making it to the end credits, there’s no other option than to look up the film online simply to reassure myself that I have really seen what I’ve seen, and that my sense of weirdness is shared by others. I will try to describe France société anonyme but I will fail. It’s simply too weird, too scattered, too proudly anarchic for that. Consider that it opens with a naked nurse walking to a 250-year-old man in 2222, as he starts telling us about his younger years from his hospital bed. The story flashing back to 1974, we (chaotically) learn how he became a drug lord, then started fighting back against a government that suddenly wanted to legalize all drugs. This is writer-director Alain Corneau’s feature film debut, and it’s markedly different from the sober crime thrillers that filled up the rest of his filmography. France Société anonyme is intentionally, aggressively weird. It features more nudity (and glimpses of hardcore sex) than you’d expect from even a 1970s French film. It zig-zags between dark social comedy, crime thriller, science fiction, cynical political commentary, art film, filmmaking satire and plenty of points in between. (Consider that the drug lord, upon seeing his empire threatened by legalization, politically organizes addicts and launches a PR campaign based on the idea that the government will use the drugs for social control and genocide.) Try not to make sense of the result, because it’s voluntarily made to confuse, shock, mislead and challenge expectations. The scene-to-scene pacing of the film is off because it seemingly goes everywhere and anywhere, with only a few key scenes allowing a plot summary when the rest of it doesn’t always seem connected to the overall story being told. (Maybe there were as many drugs off-screen than on.)  It’s a truly confounding, weird film — the kind that doesn’t court admiration, but nonetheless feels like a treat to watch for its sheer unlikeliness. I was intrigued by France société anonyme because, well, French Science Fiction films of the 1970s are already rare enough. But I ended up staying for the wackiness of the result, even if very long stretches of the film are dull and incomprehensible. It takes all kinds of films to bring up a cinephile, and this is at the edges of it all.

  • The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

    The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) If there’s a movie subgenre that I specifically hate, it’s those grainy found-footage horror films featuring an omnipotent serial killer. (It’s a surprisingly robust subgenre, as any idiot filmmaker with a camera, a knife and red syrup can try it.) I find those films pointless and repulsive on several levels. As a result, you can imagine that I was really not looking forward to The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a rather prominent title in modern horror. Part of the film’s infamy is that it took a surprisingly long time for the film to be available for public viewing. An early film from writer/director John Erick Dowdle (who ended up with a short but interesting horror filmography), it was briefly screened at a festival in 2007, was scheduled for theatrical release in 2008 but ended up yanked at the last moment, was briefly made available as video-on-demand in 2014 but had to wait until 2017 for release on home video. The ten-year window of unavailability is the kind of thing that really fuels cult interest in a film widely described as extreme horror, so it was inevitable that I’d steel myself for the results and have a peek. After seeing the film, I have good and bad news to report, although the mixed reaction is a good review in itself. At its best (which is to say its first and last 15 minutes or so), The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a surprisingly unnerving mockumentary detailing the actions of a supremely competent serial killer who left behind hundreds of tapes detailing his violent torture and murders without revealing his identity. The way Dowdle grounds his horror in reality is clever enough, with talking heads discussing serial killers, and gradually revealing the horror of the film’s specific villain. The shot in which the very long lineup of tapes is revealed is really good… but rather wasted in-context. The ending is as expected (with the killer still running free, albeit after a particularly audacious frame-up), but the film’s meta-narrative in referring to itself as an instrument for the killer is not bad. (Hilariously, one of the talking heads predicts that the killer will see the film repeatedly once it shows up in theatres and that the police will be paying attention — for a film that ended up with only a handful of theatrical showings!)  What’s in between those strong introductions and conclusions is not quite as good, with the credibility of the mockumentary being harmed by sensationalist “found footage” obviously manipulated, and talking heads that speak of the killer in dramatic, even admiring terms stopping just short of “…and he sounds really handsome!”  (There’s a good bit where the FBI profiler reads from contradictory profiles of the killer, the final one being “…he may be an FBI profiler.”) This misogynistic semi-glorification of the psychopath is what bothers me about the subgenre and specifically about this film (why should we be gawking at the near-omniscient cleverness of a serial killer?), although it has just enough substance to otherwise keep me engaged: This aside, Dowdle’s imperfect control over his material in the film’s middle section is vexing, considering the better start and ending. The basic problems with the subgenre are muted but not eliminated: it’s still a film that takes far too much delight in presenting violence in lavish voyeuristic detail, proposes a preposterously genius-level villain and features far too many sequences of actresses sobbing and screaming. Still, the fact that I haven’t dismissed The Poughkeepsie Tapes out of hand is a strong indicator that it’s one of the best examples of its kind, as damnable as it may be. I’m not a fan, but there’s an audience for this and you can see how many of the film’s elements could be recycled into something superior.

  • Frances Ha (2012)

    Frances Ha (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2021) I wasn’t expecting an epiphany from a casual viewing of mumblecore classic Frances Ha, but I got one for free, and a pretty good one at that. By itself, the film describes a few months in the life of one 27-year-old woman, starting from a cozy roommate arrangement with her best friend, and then going on (through a succession of temporary addresses that act as chapter title cards) to her putting down the foundations of a more stable adult life. (The title comes from her putting her name, or at least a part of it, on a more permanent domicile.)  Greta Gerwig is quite good in the title role, and for good reason — she co-wrote the script with director Noah Baumbach. Showily shot in black-and-white with consumer cameras, it’s a film that spends a lot of time among young people scraping together a living in New York City, rooming together to afford small apartments, going from one dead-end job to another, eating in restaurants and having one fling after another. Our protagonist seems even more unmoored than her contemporaries — unable to get a fixed address, overspending, sabotaging her relationships, lying or avoiding the truth. She’s a bit of a mess, but here’s the thing: From the vantage point of my stable mid-forties, I found her more likable than annoying, whereas I am dead certain that I would have been far more critical of her often-self-destructive actions as a younger viewer. That wasn’t what I was expecting from Frances Ha, and neither was the mirror realization that my own disputable actions as a younger person were probably seen with the same amount of amused sympathy by my elders and mentors. Better yet; I’m liable to become even more sympathetic as I age, which feels like one of the keys to elderly contentment that I’ve been hearing about. All wisdom may be found in movies, after all.

  • Rose Marie (1954)

    Rose Marie (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) The 1954 version of Rose Marie is far less known than the 1934 version (which itself was the second adaptation of the operetta of the same name), but I was really interested in finding out if the crazy Canadian content and insulting Native stereotypes of the earlier version made it through the more recent film. Alas… much of it did. To be fair, this version sticks closer to the original operetta, featuring a Canadian Mountie dealing with a young French-Canadian girl with a crush on him and a sordid murder whose consequences take up most of the film’s second half. The one improvement from 1934 to 1954 is that the Canadian setting is quite a bit more authentic this time around: The titular Rose Marie is a French-Canadian trapper’s daughter rather than an opera signer, and the film is actually set and filmed in the Canadian Rockies rather than set in Northern Quebec and filmed in California. The rather amusing “The Mounties” number is still a bombastic highlight, and the Technicolor cinematography is far more interesting to look at. There’s no James Stewart, but Ann Blyth and Howard Keel are not bad in the lead role (although, typically, Blyth’s French is not good). Where the film is as bad as its predecessor is in the portrait of Metis and Native characters as hideous stereotypes. The Metis nature of Rose Marie herself is not explored in any significant way, while the portrayal of the native characters falls into an amazingly insulting blend of disparate elements. One standout musical number, perhaps the film’s most energetic sequence, is set in the Canadian Rockies but features natives dressed in southwestern native outfits, with Plains headdresses, worshipping at the base of a costal totem. This makes no sense at all, and that’s not getting into the sudden sexualization of half-naked oiled dancers in brown-toned makeup in the middle of a very chaste film — or the sudden violence between native characters that leads to murder. It’s films like Rose Marie (either version) that justify cultural appropriation debates: As a Canadian, I’m either amused or annoyed at how the RCMP is presented as a better dressed, more bureaucratic kind of cowboy. As someone with even the tiniest possible amount of cultural awareness, I’m aghast at the portrayal of native culture lavishly presented as truthful (even for Hollywood values of truth). Fortunately, Rose Marie hasn’t been remade since 1954, and I wouldn’t expect it to be — this is one case where a general aversion to musicals may be helpful. Even for musical fans, the operetta form can be annoying and if this 1954 take on Anne Marie isn’t as heavy on the “When I’m calling you-oo-oo-oo-oo will you answer too-oo-oo-oo-oo?” as its predecessors, it’s still not much in terms of fun songs. Nor much in terms of a fun film, even when it mugs for laughs.

  • The Fighting Temptations (2003)

    The Fighting Temptations (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) I couldn’t be farther removed from a small-town Georgia black gospel choir, but there’s something curiously comforting in The Fighting Temptations given how it embraces familiar characteristics. Using an urban character returning home as a way into the complexities of a local choir, this is a film built on familiar settings, broad characters and formulaic storytelling. The shortcomings of that mode are obvious, but the underestimated advantage is that nearly every filmgoer, no matter where they come from or what they look like, instantly “knows” what to expect from the characters and the setting. Oh, so the prodigal son returns, eager to get back to Manhattan? Not going to happen. Oh, so the cute childhood crush is back in the picture and she can sing? I know where this is going. This power-mad middle-aged woman is running roughshod over members of the choir? I wouldn’t want to be her at the end of the film! It’s all predictable, but the draw in The Fighting Temptations is more about the actors playing close to their personas, and the choir/gospel music that makes up much of the soundtrack. As such, it’s not bad. Beyoncé Knowles doesn’t stretch too much by playing a singer, while Cuba Gooding Jr. makes for an audience anchor as he goes back home and is saddled with extensive requirements in order to inherit from his deceased aunt. Many bit-players have their own short arc in the ensemble cast of characters, but there isn’t much here to irritate… or to remember. The pieces all fit nicely by the end of the film and we wouldn’t have it any other way. As a sympathetic approximation of churchgoing black life in the small-town south, The Fighting Temptations is quite likable even to those who have never been close to anything like it.

  • Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)

    Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Film history tells us that the classical movie musical was losing steam by the mid-to-late 1950s, and you can almost sense this exhaustion at work in Meet Me in Las Vegas, a lavish MGM musical that took an interest in that new(ish) American playground — Las Vegas, conveniently close enough to Hollywood as to allow for extensive location shooting. The plot premise has something to do with a gambling rancher (Dan Dailey) falling for a lucky ballerina (Cyd Charisse, in one of the biggest roles of her career), but one senses that the point of the film was to use the flashy lights and growing reputation of Las Vegas as a backdrop to a movie musical. There are plenty of small appearances and cameos from people such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (anticipating the Brat Pack), as well as Peter Lorre and Tony Martin (who wasn’t a relation to Dean, but was married to Charisse). It also features Lena Horne’s last film appearance as a singing performer, which further buries the end of an era. Still, the film’s intended showcase sequence is a rather entertaining parody of “Frankie and Johnny” — even in a career full of highlights, this feels like an anthology piece designed for Charisse. For her, Meet Me in Las Vegas as a whole is one of her best and comes toward the end of her best run of movies as a headliner (the superior Silk Stockings would soon follow, but also mark the end of her MGM dancing/acting period): she gets some decent dance numbers, a substantial dramatic part and a character suited for her not-always-warm persona. If you get away from Charisse’s performance and the musical numbers (which are fewer in numbers than you’d expect from a 1950s MGM musical), the film doesn’t quite fare as well — while the atmosphere of circa-1956 Las Vegas is interesting in its own right and sometimes gorgeously captured, the film has frequent lulls and a finale that doesn’t quite hit the mark. As I said — the MGM musical was a specific kind of film, and it wasn’t necessarily well suited to tackling an environment such as Las Vegas. Director Roy Rowland was nearing the end of his career at the time, and so was the “Freed Unit” (of which Meet Me in Las Vegas was not a production). You can certainly see the film as stuck between two sensibilities — the earlier musical style and the younger brashness of the Vegas environment, whose musical style was not necessarily that of musicals.   Comparisons with Ocean’s Eleven, three years later, are most instructive in seeing how even the musical genre changed in order to accommodate Vegas.

  • The Mad (2007)

    The Mad (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) The problem with zombie movies is that they’re often the ideal choice for no-budget horror filmmakers: most casual film fans have no idea how low the bottom of the barrel goes in that subgenre. While The Mad is not quite there, it does hover menacingly over a pit of infinite awfulness. Two things save it from being much worse: a somewhat comic approach, and having an actor like Billy Zane as an anchor. The plot, as much as it has one beyond the usual zombie mayhem, takes a topical-for-2007 quality in featuring a mad cow disease variant that transforms its victims into flesh-eating maniacs. (Heck, even the pieces of meat themselves are wont to attack human victims.)  It does give a more ambitious comic nature to the film, with passable dialogue filling in for the familiar plot beats. Zane is also noteworthy in that he’s clearly a better actor than nearly everyone else, and his ability to project a certain comic attitude is aligned with the film’s goals. Still, the technical production values are low and it’s not the zombies mooing at their human targets that necessarily bring The Mad back from its numerous issues. Perhaps best appreciated by zombie movie fans — otherwise, there are much better zombie films (even zombie comedy films) available out there.

  • The Silver Horde (1930)

    The Silver Horde (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) As much as I like the 1930s a lot as a filmmaking decade, it gets rougher the older you go, and The Silver Horde is perhaps most remarkable for reminding us of the awkward period during which silent cinema transitioned to sound. Among other obvious artefacts, we have title cards being used to simplify narrative development (why show when you can tell?), a sound mixing that often goes completely silent in between dialogue (without background noises or music), and a rigidity of camera work that betrays those early loud boxed-in cameras. This is all the more remarkable in that The Silver Horde takes on grand ambitions for its backdrop, heading to Alaska for some great outdoor sequences. The initial excitement at setting an adventure story way up north soon fades as the film heads for the interiors of Seattle and the familiar machinations of a romantic comedy in which women vie for lead actor Joel McCrae’s attention. There are a few highlights (including an action scene set aboard a fishing boat, nicely handled), but otherwise the film soon turns unremarkable, except when its technical limitations become apparent. While The Silver Horde technically qualifies as a Pre-Code film, it does not really feature any of the characteristics that film fans have come to associate with the era — there’s little in here that couldn’t have been executed in the same way a few years later. As such, The Silver Horde is a bit of a snore even at 75 minutes — it’s only mildly interesting in its plotting and is perhaps most notable for being one of McCrae’s earliest starring roles, and the first of his three on-screen pairings with Jean Arthur, also in an early role. The look at salmon fishing, however, does have a quasi-documentary interest.

  • Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

    Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) The Cannon Group’s Ninja Trilogy has never been about mature, respectable realism, but even by the wild standards of the series, Ninja III: The Domination is particularly ludicrous. Fully assuming the mystical portrayal of the ninja, this third instalment has a body-hopping ninja spirit taking over our heroine, wild action sequences (including the opening one, in which a ninja takes down a helicopter from a nearby palm tree) and impossible action beats (such as drilling down into the ground so hard as to, um, create a canyon?) Then there’s the production date of the film and all it carries with it — it goes without saying that our heroine is not only a telephone linewoman, but also an aerobics instructor, giving the film a chance for some leotard-driven leering. I’ll give it something: it’s hard to stop watching when you’re constantly wondering what crazy thing the film is going to pull out of its hat. But as far as narrative continuity, character development or even consistent tone is concerned, this is really not the best choice. “Only a ninja can destroy a ninja” is the guiding principle of the plotting in the film’s second half, and you get what you get from that. Definitely funny despite not being made as a comedy, Ninja III: The Domination does conclude Cannon’s Ninja Trilogy on a dubious high point — but there’s a limit to the appreciation that such a film can generate, and a late-night cult classic is really not the same thing as a real classic, or even a solid film that avoids derision.

  • Tamahine (1963)

    Tamahine (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) The nature of social progress isn’t merely that something quite mainstream will be considered dated decades later, but that even progressive works will be seen as horribly inappropriate. I’ll grant that, in the case of Tamahine, it’s difficult to detect any progressive intention in the first place: As the story of a young Polynesian girl who upsets the staid culture of a respectable all-male English boarding school, it often feels like an excuse to leer at the young girl at the centre of the film. But if you look closer, there’s an argument to be made that the film was daring for its time. Crucially, the film stars Nancy Kwan, one of the rare actors of Asian ethnicity to get prominent billing in the Anglosphere at the time. This was one of her few starring roles, and if you’re willing to be approximate about ethnic casting (Kwan was from Hong Kong; her character is Polynesian), there’s something still remarkable about an entire movie resting on her shoulders. Of course, it’s not all that progressive if the point of the character is to be leered at by characters and audiences — that’s when we flip into exoticism and objectification. Still, not so fast: Our young heroine is firmly in control, as she creates lust wherever she goes, frees an institution from its notional shackles and changes the world around her to fit her worldview rather than the opposite. It’s still not that comfortable to see endless variations on the same sex comedy jokes directed toward a 17-year-old character (not to mention her being The Prize for the male characters), but it’s perhaps not quite as bleak as it sounds on paper. Still, what was then supposed to be a lighthearted comedy has become a much more exhausting film to assess, with its implicit assumptions being far more problematic nowadays. Tamahine may have pushed the envelope of permissible content in conservative early-1960s Great Britain, but today it feels more like the fantasy of a creepy leering old man. But so it goes — I really wonder how some of today’s work will feel like in a few decades.

  • Tortilla Flat (1942)

    Tortilla Flat (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) If I can chime in on the ongoing cultural appropriation debate and the necessity to let people tell their own stories, we can nod in the direction of classic Hollywood films such as Tortilla Flat as a piece of evidence to enter in the record. By 1942, I’m sure that the film was a noble endeavour, setting itself in a small fishing community to offer a portrait of a simple life, with Caucasian characters living alongside Hispanic ones and spouting the virtues of a slower, poorer, more rural existence. It even features money as the root of most of the characters’ problems. It’s from a Steinbeck novel, so the producers could even claim a literary pedigree. While the film was apparently not a big box-office hit at the time, headliners such as Spencer Tracy (echoing the work he’d later do on The Old Man and the Sea) and Hedy Lamarr (somehow cast as Hispanic), ensure that the film does retain some marquee value even today. But many things have changed in the eighty years since then, and the overwhelming impression left by Tortilla Flat today is one of overwhelming fakery. Racial miscasting doesn’t help and neither does the title, but once you get into the film itself, it’s the entire thing that feels insincere, with Hollywood types talking down and outside their experience in an attempt to deliver something manufactured to the masses. I may be overreacting, but the film’s stereotypes and condescending attitudes are overwhelming — there is simply no way that someone from that kind of background would write something like this as representative, and that is the point of cultural appropriation and filmmaking-for-all debates: Let people tell their own stories and they will be much better at it. More credible, anyway.

  • The Ghoul (1933)

    The Ghoul (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) I really did try to get interested in The Ghoul. It is a Boris Karloff film, after all, and the early 1930s were an unusually fruitful period for horror. Film historians will further pile on and point out that this was a pivotal film for Karloff (who filmed it in his native England while on a contract dispute with his Hollywood studio), that it’s considered the second-earliest British horror film and that the entire film disappeared from the 1940s to the 1970s, when a terrible version was found and was considered the best available until a reference-quality version was finally discovered in the late 1980s. I like those rescued-from oblivion comeback stories, but even learning that wasn’t enough to make me forget the ponderousness and repetitiveness of the result. It certainly does not help that the film is quite similar to The Mummy, which also starred Karloff but was released a year earlier. Both films share the same actor, obviously, but also strong neo-Egyptian themes (in keeping with the 1930s craze), themes of immortality, the resurrection of an ancient monster and a macabre atmosphere. It pales in comparison to the earlier American effort, although it does have some really good makeup for the time. Best recommended to Karloff and horror completists — more casual audiences should be happier with The Mummy instead.