Review: 'The Old Dark House' Blu-ray

Frankenstein is an undisputed masterpiece of Gothic horror with one of the great on screen performances from Boris Karloff as what is probably the most iconic depiction of a classic monster ever seared into celluloid. James Whale never made a more famous film—and not many other filmmakers have either—yet Frankenstein still doesn’t feel like his definitive work because it is almost completely lacking in a key Whale element: droll humor. He did not start stirring this essential ingredient into his horror movies until his next one: a nutso adaptation of J.B. Priestley’s novel Benighted called The Old Dark House.

The Old Dark House is a classic old dark house set up: on a stormy night, a rag-tag group of strangers seek shelter at a creepy manse full of ooky kooky weirdos. Plot-wise, there is very little else to The Old Dark House, but Benn W. Levy’s script gives a remarkable cast featuring Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas, Eva Moore, and the divine Ernest Thesiger oodles of delicious things to say. As a leering butler without the ability to speak, Karloff does not get to roll Levy’s words over his tongue as the rest of the gang does, but he still makes his presence felt in an unhinged and unsettling performance. And the cool thing about The Old Dark House that distinguishes it from Whale’s other horror-comedies—The Invisible Man, and his real defining piece, Bride of Frankenstein—is that it still hold up as true-blue horror, blending in some genuinely chilling moments among the clowning.

Universal lost the right to release The Old Dark House after the Priestley estate resold the story to Columbia so it could remake Benighted in 1963 (and though I love director William Castle to death, it’s a lousy film), but this may actually be a good thing since Universal now only seems interested in its golden age horrors featuring the Big-Six monsters. If Universal still had dibs on The Old Dark House, we may never have gotten a Blu-ray release, which we now have thanks to the Cohen Film Collection. This 4K restoration looks miraculous compared to Kino’s 1999 DVD. The picture is clean and boasts beautiful contrast. The grain can get a bit intense, but these moments are few and hardly disrupt what is overall a fabulously clean presentation for a film of this age. Even the opening reel, which is only a dupe since the original was too decayed to use, looks pretty great. However, the soundtrack is somewhat tinny and noisy in patches, and the noise gets particularly hairy in the penultimate reel.

Most of the extras—feature commentaries with Gloria Stuart and James Curtis (who wrote the essential James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters) and an interview with Curtis Harrington, who knew Whale and hunted down the original negative of the film—were ported over from the Kino DVD (only an image gallery was lost in translation). Cohen only adds a booklet interview with Harrington and a 15-minute video interview with Boris’s daughter Sara Karloff, who discusses her dad’s career, difficulty in the makeup chair, and unique voice and body language. However, a lack of abundant new bonuses are of little consequence considering how much one of the great old films now looks like a great new film.

'The Old Dark House' Coming to Blu-Ray This Halloween Season

The Old Dark House is one of Universal's best and most underrated horror films of the 1930s. It's the movie on which director James Whale really started exploring the humor that would blossom in his twin masterworks The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein, and features a killer cast that includes Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, and Melvyn Douglas. 

This October 24, Cohen Media Groups will give this underrated picture its due with the first Blu-ray presentation of The Old Dark House. No word on the bonus features yet, but a 4K restoration of this ooky, kooky classic is reason to start celebrating now. Have a potato!

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 296

The Date: July 22

The Movie: The Old Dark House (1932)

What Is It?: Possibly the first horror/comedy to play to a more sophisticated audience than sillier old dark house pictures such as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat Whispers. American Lilian Bond is particularly hilarious as Charles Laughton’s hot footed, flapper gal pal Gladys. James Whale’s The Old Dark House is not merely good for a laugh; in one absolutely chilling sequence, Eva Moore’s haggard face is reflected in various surfaces, growing more and more distorted as she rants at negligee-clad Gloria Stuart. The reveal of Moore and Ernest Thesiger’s insane 102-year old brother, played by actress Elspeth Dudgeon, is just as unsettling.

Why Today?: On this day in 1889, James Whale is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 170

The Date: March 18

The Movie: The Night of the Hunter (1955)

What Is It?: It’s a two-day Charles Laughton fest! And today he is behind the camera for the one and only time. His film in which Robert Mitchum plays a demonic, child-hunting preacher is appropriately unique... like watching the most beautiful and most terrifying dream come to life on screen. The riverboat escape sequence may be cinema’s single finest sequence.

Why Today?: On this day in 1932, Harry Powers, the real killer who inspired demonic preacher Harry Powell, is hing-hang-hunged.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 169

The Date: March 17

The Movie: Island of Lost Souls (1932)

What Is It?: Considering how full of cinematic possibilities H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau is, it’s quite impressive and a bit confounding that Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 adaptation still has not been topped. Charles Laughton is the portrait of self-delighted evil as the beast-rehabilitating doc. Richard Arlen is all sweaty angst as the lone survivor of the shipwreck of the Lady Vain.

Why Today?: On this day in the novel, the Lady Vain wrecks.

Review: The Criterion Edition of ‘Island of Lost Souls’

Ask a classic monster fanatic what the most unjustly unavailable movie is and that nut would likely respond, “Island of Lost Souls.” Why Erle C. Kenton’s brilliant 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau has been out of print for so long has never been satisfactorily answered. Fortunately, that question is no longer relevant since Criterion has now given this overdue movie its due. We can finally revel in Charles Laughton’s dastardly portrayal of sadistic vivisectionist/mad scientist Moreau and Bela Lugosi’s desperate Sayer of the Law (“Are we not men?!?”) and Kathleen Burke’s sexy, tragic Lota the Panther Woman and Kenton’s enthralling atmosphere and pre-code edginess on DVD and Blu-ray any time we please.

Criterion’s transfer is a composite of several sources of varying quality. The restoration is not immediately striking because the film is front-loaded with the rougher bits. The daylight scenes that dominate the beginning of the film are gauzy, giving the false impression of weak images. The actors almost seem to glow. Once the picture moves into the shadowy, higher-contrast nighttime scenes that dominate it, the restoration looks very, very good. The composite also includes passages of dialogue censored since the film’s original release. They most likely include Moreau’s “Do you know what it means to feel like God?” which closely resembles a similarly censored line from Whale’s Frankenstein.

We get an audio commentary from the charming horror historian Gregory Mank and four very different video commentaries. The most traditional is a scholarly analysis by David Skal, our best monster movie documentarian and author of the absolutely essential Monster Show. He discusses Wells’s novel and the film’s themes and sources, the most-revelatory suggestion being that Laughton may have based his Moreau on Oscar Wilde. I’m not convinced of his claim that the film reflects co-screenwriter Philip Wylie’s misogyny, though. Both female characters are sympathetic and both are responsible for rescuing the men. Only villainous Moreau expresses any contempt for women. Compared to something like King Kong, Lost Souls is practically progressive.

Next up is a fun roundtable with John Landis, Rick Baker, and Bob Burns, who geek out about the performances, makeup, and atmosphere. Burns also gets off the best comment on the DVD when Landis asks him why he likes Kenton’s schlocky House of Frankenstein. Burns responds, “It has Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.” Hear, hear.

We also get a talk with director Richard Stanley, who was let go from the disastrous 1996 adaptation starring Marlon Brando and completed by John Frankenheimer. Stanley goes in depth about Wells but is fairly dismissive of all the film versions and could have provided more information about his ousting from his own project.

The oddest extra in the bunch is a discussion with Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale of Devo, who talk about the film’s influence on their image, philosophy, and songs (“Are we not men? We are Devo”). The talk leads them on some fascinating tangents about Ohio horror host Ghoulardi, who’s show introduced the guys to the movie, and the infamous Kent State protest/cop-shooting-spree that inspired Neil Young’s “Ohio”. Also included is a valuable Devo short film from 1976, which is basically an edit of music videos for “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo” that doesn’t quite look like the union of German Expressionism and McDonald’s commercials the guys intended it to be.

Review: The Criterion edition of 'The Night of the Hunter'

In 1955, actor Charles Laughton directed his first and final film and Robert Mitchum embodied one of the cinema’s most relentless, frightening, and oddly humorous bogeymen. Mitchum is Harry Powell, a psychotic Big Bad Wolf in preacher’s clothing on the hunt for a pair of children who know the location of a cache of cash (and how relevant is that theme of a predatory priest today, kids?).