🐈‍⬛ spooky capsule reviews 🐇

universal horror, mark samuels, bora chung

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The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

This movie is something like two scenes away from being a masterpiece, but whether it’s two scenes short or it contains two too many, I cannot tell you.

In this film, an unwitting American couple on their honeymoon in Hungary get dragged into some Old World grudges when Bela Lugosi happens to also be in their train cabin.¹ Lugosi is on his way to visit an old friend (mortal enemy) played by Boris Karloff.² Karloff tried to get Lugosi killed in battle and then he stole his wife. Now he lives, with a beautiful wife named Karen, in a pristine Art Deco building built on the site of the fortress where he betrayed Lugosi to the enemy. (He also betrayed thousands of other people who died, which Lugosi brings up from time to time but Karloff doesn’t ever seem to care much about.)

There’s a period of maybe five minutes wh…