6/9/10

The Black Sleep



Hollywood legends Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine, Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson gathered together in 1956 for one of the worst movies ever made. I haven't seen it yet, but have been wanting to for about 20 years. It's hulu, so you get a steady stream with a couple of commercials.

3 comments:

  1. I loved Lon Chaney Jr.'s entrance in this (Only Karloff is his equal in monster pathos) but man... I had to give up on this one soon after that.

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  2. It's way less interesting than I thought it would be. I was expecting an independent exploitation film along the lines of Ed Wood. But this is more like a B film from a big studio, which is almost always boring.

    I'm not a fan of Chaney jr. I empathize with the sad life he lived, but he always looks like a sloppy drunk in the movies, which is what he was most of the time.

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  3. Heh, yes. You can see he's plastered in this. That's why i like that one scene - it's frightening in an unhinged, homeless, way and really sad. But it's the only performance in the 20 or some minutes I got through that wasn't completely studio-phoned. I did remember liking him as a kid in the Wolfman (and Abbott and Costello) but to be honest, my monster movie watching really almost stopped after Star Wars. It was pretty much all sci-fi from then on.

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