Ryan Watches 50 Movies

First of all, I want to say that I discovered something very cool while watching this movie. But I'm not going to tell you what it was until my "comments" section, so keep reading. Now, here's something odd. Before this week, I'd seen the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu once, on Turner Classic Movies, and in the version I saw there, the vampire in the film was named Count Orlok. In the version included on the 50 Movie Classics: Horror DVD set I'm trudging through now, that character's name is Count Dracula. Apparently the Bram Stoker novel Dracula was still copyrighted in 1922, which explains why the German filmmakers changed the villains name and many other details. But I wonder, at what point did somebody create a new English print of the film in which his name was Dracula instead of Orlok? And if the film is in the public domain, does that mean I could take the film, add new titles establishing his name as Dr. Macadamia van Goofberry, and sell cop...

Two weeks ago I watched a Lon Chaney, Sr. movie. Last week I watched a Lon Chaney, Jr. movie. This week it's the elder Chaney's turn again as I watched 1923's The Hunchback of Notre Dame . I've never read the Victor Hugo book, and the only other adaptation I've seen is the Disney musical which I assume took one or two liberties with the original story. But I do happen to own a copy of Marvel Comics' The Incredible Hulk versus Quasimodo from 1983: Is that cool or what? It was written by longtime Hulk writer Bill Mantlo, with art by Sal Buscema and Steve Mitchell, and features the Hulk actually fighting the hunchback in the cathedral of Notre Dame. But of course, I'm here to talk about the classic movie, not some silly comic book, so let's proceed. Synopsis The Notre Dame cathedral is a big ol' church in Paris. It serves as a sanctuary for many of the city's impoverished, and today it's the site of the Festival of Fools , a big ol' party ...

First of all, I want to mention that I just spent 20 minutes wandering around my apartment looking under things because I could not find my notes on this movie, before finally finding them in an unlikely place. Now, it may just be that I misplaced them, but I don't think that's the true explanation. I'm almost certain that my notes were, in fact, stolen and hidden from me by... THE PHANTOM ! The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney (Senior), based on the 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux, which was of course based on the Twiggy episode of The Muppet Show , in which the theater is haunted by the Phantom of the Muppet Show. These days, of course, when most people think of the Phantom story, they think of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. I've seen the musical, but fortunately I had forgotten enough of it that I didn't know everything that was going to happen in the movie. Synopsis The Paris Opera House is enormous, and grand, and palatial... and...

Today I'm going to do something a little different. This week I watched Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , a silent film from 1920 which stars John Barrymore (Drew's grandpa!) and is much more classic than most of the movies in my 50-film DVD set, even if it is a total rip-off of The Nutty Professor . By an incredible coincidence, this was also the week I purchased The Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 , a fantastic DVD set which includes the 1955 Bugs Bunny cartoon Hyde and Hare , which is a slightly sillier take on the Robert Louis Stevenson book. So I'm going to compare the two to see how they... um, compare. Dr. Jekyll In the Barrymore movie, Dr. Jekyll is a selfless philanthropist who loves nothing more than taking care of sick poor people. You know the type -- he makes the rest of us feel guilty for spending our free time watching America's Got Talent instead of volunteering. He often wears a hat. In the Bugs Bunny cartoon, Dr. Jekyll is a timid little man (voic...

First of all, a note for those of you who aren't familiar with this film: Metropolis is not a film about Superman's city of residence. Second of all, a question: What the hey? Metropolis , the silent German classic directed by Fritz Lang in the 1920s, has fallen into the public domain like the rest of the films on the 50-movie Horror Classics DVD set -- or at least, versions of it have. But there are two reasons I'm surprised to see it included here: 1. It's considered a genuinely classic film, a distinction not traditionally associated with the likes of The Mad Monster and The Invisible Ghost, and 2. It's not a horror film, and anyone who has seen it would know that it fits much more logically into the category of science fiction. Perhaps the folks at Mill Creek Entertainment are reading this right now, and perhaps they'll slap their foreheads and realize, "Of course this isn't a horror movie! What were we thinking! Let's take out an ad in a ...