The Black Cat

I'd be giving it a 10 even if it had nothing but an empty house with no people, no script, no plot, no nothing but that incredibly amazing house which I plan on reverse engineering into my own dream house in the near future as soon as I win the lottery. Of course most people would rather live in flowery country cottage surrounded by bowls of wax fruit, so they see Karloff's pad as sterile, cold, and creepy...proof that there's no accounting for taste among the general population. But the movie, yeah, it's a good one. Wasn't exactly sure who were the women encased in blocks of Lucite but it seemed like a fine idea, a pretty cool display of the ladies. Bela "the world's greatest psychiatrist" Lugosi lacked bedside manner but what would you expect. Boris was top notch, hair cut like a freaky arrow and his clothes were a cross between Star Trek and the KKK with upholstered accoutrements.

The best of the collaborations between Karloff & Lugosi. The production values are high and Karloff's makeup is excellent. There is a lot going on it the script-- perhaps too much, as the script is a bit confusing and sometimes pointless. But the atmosphere is thick and the "aura" hangs over the movie like a dense mist. There is more horror implied than actually seen. This movie has black magic, a man skinned alive, treachery, phobia, and a chess game with lives at stake. Mostly, it has great performances by Karloff and Lugosi in their one and only film appearance as equals (without one dominating the other). Truly, this is one of the finest Universal horror classics and will deliver everything a fan of such fare could possibly want.

There's a lot of story to tell in about 65 minutes, so this movie could be considered perhaps a bit incoherent. But the larger themes -- revenge, lust and innocents caught in the grip of forces beyond their sheltered experience -- have been central themes in horror tales for centuries. Karloff is a delight as usual, and there are many fine details to his performance -- including a brief but outrageously lustful stare at the half-dressed young wife of the innocent couple and the strangely gentle way his brutal character handles a cat. (Nice tall, dark and handsome kitty in the title role, for the cat people.) And this movie also shows once again that Bela Lugosi was a better actor than he ever got credit for. He handles his overwrought dialogue with taste and good cheer, and he's a marvel. And he even gets to speak a few rare lines of Hungarian here.