The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1

Victorian Justice League

The League Of
Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
America’s Best Comics
ISBN  9781563898587

Okay... so very behind the times but I’m finally catching up with the first collected edition of Volume 1 of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and, this is the story the film was purported to be based on... I’ll get to that in a minute, in no uncertain terms.

My first observation, which gave me a chuckle, is that the publishers of the book are called America’s Finest Comics which... well, I think it says it all when you realise that the story is written by the great Alan Moore, the famous English author and drawn by the great, again English, comic book illustrator Kevin O’Neill. Both of these talents are one of a kind geniuses hailing from the UK.

Indeed Moore is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest writer in comics of all time... nobody else even comes close (except for Neil Gaiman, perhaps... but not that close). Many films have been made of his properties and he’s tried to distance himself from the movie ‘adaptations’ as much as possible, going so far as to have his name removed from the credits of various big budget versions. His greatest work though is, curiously, untouched by Hollywoodland... namely The Ballad Of Halo Jones for 2000AD, which I still count as the single greatest piece of literature ever written, comic book or otherwise.

Kevin O’ Neill I also discovered from those early issues of 2000AD back in the day, drawing such strips as Nemesis The Warlock, among many others. His style is certainly unique and, well he passed away in 2022 and is very much missed.

Now then, I always quite liked the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen but, golly, having now read the original story on which it’s said to be based, I have to say I’m very unhappy about the way the movie turned out. It’s nothing like. It doesn’t have the breadth of the original tale in any way, shape or form. It’s like the writers of the film just threw a few related characters together (some of them and certainly not all the same ones or even with the same personalities) and did their own thing.

Take Allan Quatermain, for example. Depicted as an old man as Sean Connery was when he played him for sure but, the movie version didn’t have him spending all his time fighting off his addiction to drugs and so on. Some of the characters are also similar but, not quite the same. For instance, the Mr. Hyde version of Dr. Jeykll is an abomination, using quite shocking swear words and basically ‘hulking out’ whenever an unstoppable and violent force is needed (like a wookie, good at tearing people’s arms off). Then there’s Mina Murray... it won’t take you long to realise that, before her divorce, she was Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula... and since she was bitten she has, as far as this first volume is concerned, hypnotic persuasion. The Invisible Man is a bit of a villain but working with the group too... though not worrying about brutally killing innocent bystanders to help himself to things. And Captain Nemo, of course, who the film kind of got right, actually.... to an extent.

But it’s the depth of the other appearances too, in this world of 1898, as the group work together to wrest stolen Cavorite... yes that’s right, as invented by Dr. Cavor in H. G. Well’s The First Men In The Moon to aid space travel... from the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu in the Limehouse region of London, where he builds a big war airship harnessing the Cavorite to bomb London. However, when ‘the league’ do finally get it back for the British Secret Service, they find out they were not working for whom they thought and were, in fact, working for Professor Moriarty, for his own fiendish schemes (there’s a lovely set of panels detailing how he survived the altercation with Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls).

So the league are, once again, on their way to retrieve the Cavorite and foil Moriarty’s plans... not realising that Moriarty was put in place as the Napoleon of Crime by the British Government itself, for reasons which might actually make some sense, if you’re as cynical as I am.

And on the way they meet a wealth of characters from popular literature of the time that had me lapping up this story and it’s lovely artwork with much joy. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s original detective character C. Auguste Dupin meets the league and puts them on the trail to recruit the Jekyll and Hyde character, who he thinks is a return of the monkey killer from The Murders In The Rue Morgue. They even, at some point, have to stay the night in a boarding school run by a certain Miss Rosa Coote from visceral Victorian BDSM tale Miss Coote’s Confessions, from the underground magazine The Pearl (among others... which started me on a course to sympathy with that particular lifestyle at a fairly young age... well, if the grown ups would leave notorious and bloody Victorian pornography around then, what do you expect?).

There’s even an appearance by the gang of the Artful Dodger at some point, who seems to be running the gang of pickpockets after the death of Bill Sikes in Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

But enough... I don’t want to spoil everything other than to say I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series, which I believe will make good on those shooting flares heading towards Earth from the planet Mars, which are mentioned in this one. What are the chances, eh?

Invisible Agent

 

 

I Spy No Spy

Invisible Agent
USA 1942 Directed by Edwin L. Marin
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

So next up from Universal’s 'Invisible franchise' was their attempt to aid the war effort in 1942 with the Invisible Agent. This one takes the grandson of the original Griffin character, who has changed his name to Frank Raymond (played by Jon Hall) in order to avoid association with the actions of the original character (which I guess dates the original movie back generations... although I’m really not sure how, time wise, The Invisible Man Returns (reviewed here) could place this relation as a grandson.

The film starts off with quite a dark tone in America, when some German and Japanese allies led by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as SS Man Conrad Stauffer (who you’ll remember from both The Invisible Man Returns and The Ghost Of Frankenstein reviewed here) and Peter Lorre as the Japanese Baron Ikito (I guess it takes an Austrian to play a credible Japanese man?), try to get the formula to invisibility at the start off the film but Frank manages to barely escape with his life, after they nearly cut his fingers off in one of the paper cutting machines he has in his stationer’s shop. After Frank’s ‘cover’ is blown, the US army asks Frank for the invisibility formula but he refuses. The next thing we know we have footage and newspaper reportage of the attack on Pearl Harbour and Frank changes his mind. agreeing to let the US army make one of their secret agents invisible, on the condition that it’s him instead of a member of the military, so nobody else gets hurt by he formula (which is an interesting point in terms of the dangers of the formula because, this is the only point in the film which these dangers are addressed... I’ll mention that again a little later).

So next thing you know he’s flown to London and then being parachute dropped into the heart of Nazi Germany to find a reliable informant, high ranking lady Maria Sorenson, who is played by Hungarian actress Ilona Massey... who looks wonderful in this and who actually receives top billing above Jon Hall in the cast list.

And it’s a fun romp of heroic wartime propaganda as Frank Raymond infiltrates the Germans to discover their plan to bomb New York, has a comedy routine as an invisible third for dinner when Maria dines with a high ranking member of the SS and ultimately flies with her back to the UK after bombing the nazi planes and generally succeeding in his mission behind enemy lines, on most counts. The film also has a scene with Peter Lorre where his special ‘surgeon’ is played by his once Mr. Moto co-star and number one son himself, Keye Luke. It’s unusual and interesting for me to see Luke playing what amounts to a ‘sinister by proxy’, villainous role in the story.

And, for the time and even, in some instances, for contemporary times, the special effects are quite well done. When Frank parachutes into enemy territory after his plane is shot at by the Germans, he strips off his clothing in mid air so it’s just the parachute and harness left at the end of the sequence, still securely fastened around his invisible body and... well... it certainly looks pretty convincing still, even on Blu Ray. Ditto for a scene where an informant hands him a glass of coffee and he takes it and drinks it down invisibly with no cuts to the shot. It looks amazing although, later, when the informant is pictured on his own, I noticed his hands went a bit transparent in one area of the shot so there’s a clue there to the photographic process used, I guess.

It’s also the first time, I think (I may be wrong), when the invisible hero uses cold cream and spreads it over his face in shot so you can slowly see his features materialise. I used to see David  McCallum do this more or less every week in the 1970s on his The Invisible Man TV show, I’m sure, but for 1942, the sequence is no less well done and must have been pretty effective to audiences seeing this on first release. It’s nice stuff.

Another interesting thing that strikes me about the film... and I’m sure that this is true of a lot of the films made at the time about a similar subject... is the mixed nature of the tone. It’s trying to be light and comical but the darkness inherent in the World War II situation is also felt and portrayed in a kind of, ‘matter of fact’ way which almost undercuts the atrocities that it’s not shirking at dealing with. For instance, one of Frank’s informants is ‘questioned’ by the Nazis and then asked to sign a declaration saying that when they released him they had treated him well. He can’t however, sign it like they ask because they’ve already broken all his fingers.

Similarly, the demise of two of the main villains is fairly bleak. When it’s clear that Stauffer and Ikito have failed in their mission (and have grown to show a lot less respect for each other than when they were first introduced into the plot), Ikito shows Stauffer what it’s like to ‘die with honour’ by stabbing him to death and then, in a poetic moment of the dark propaganda machine in action, tears Stauffer’s swastika from him arm and wipes his bloody knife on it before committing seppuku himself in another grim moment.

What is interesting in terms of the continuity with the rest of the series... or lack of it in this case... is that the process whereby the invisibility chemical slowly, over a number of days, causes madness in the subject, while hinted at tangentially in the early part of the film, is completely forgotten as it would be inconvenient to the plot. Frank never once looks like his thinking is compromised and he stays an ‘invisible hero’ throughout the course of the picture. I can’t remember if this plot point is brought back for the next movie but, yeah, it’s pretty much dumped here.

Other than that, though, I don’t have much more to say about Invisible Agent, other than Hans Salter is listed as musical director and some of the cues recognisable from The Wolfman (reviewed here) and Return Of The Invisible Man make their way into this, freshly recorded in different orchestrations (it seemed to me), as part of he score. But Invisible Agent is fun, the good guy gets the girl (who would also turn up in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman) and a blow is struck against Nazi Germany... in Hollywoodland at least. It still holds up today in sequences where you wouldn’t expect it to (such as many of the special effects scenes) and it’s something I’d recommend to most cinephiles interested in this period and genre of American cinematic history.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Gauze To The Wall

The Invisible Man
USA 1933 Directed by James Whale
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

The Invisible Man is the fourth of the big Universal monster movies of the 1930s, following on from Dracula (1931, reviewed here), Frankenstein (1931, reviewed here) and The Mummy (1932, reviewed here). Director James Whale, who had already directed Frankenstein, was offered a sequel to that film but turned it down to do The Invisible Man instead, based on the H. G. Wells novel of the same title. It would be another couple of years before he made his ‘superior to the original’ sequel to Frankenstein.

This is actually a groundbreaking film for Universal in terms of special effects and pretty much all the invisibility stuff you see in this picture was being done for the first time. So the film sparked lots of curiosity and, like the three Universal horror movies before it, was a box office smash, spawning many sequels... although it has to be said that some of the sequels in The Invisible Man series are a little more creative in terms of the direction they take.

The film is, as you would expect from the work of this director, both extremely atmospheric while at the same time having sharp stabs of humour throughout. The film starts off quite strongly with the antagonist of the title, Jack Griffin (played by Claude Rains in his first big break in Hollywood), arriving at an inn for a room, covered in bandages and the dark, wraparound glasses which are somewhat iconic in their use in Gothic style horror movies... Vincent Price, who also played The Invisible Man twice, uses very similar ones in Tomb Of Ligeia. It’s ironic that he plays the film either totally swathed in gauze bandages or stark naked (and therefore invisible)... even the shot of him at the end, when his face becomes visible, finally, due to circumstances I won’t reveal here, is a shot of a live cast of him rather than the actor himself. Boris Karloff was earmarked for the role originally but personal differences between him and Whale meant that Rains, who does have a remarkably unmistakeable voice, got his big break, despite a truly terrible screen test he had once done for Hollywood.

The atmosphere is intense as Griffin’s experiments to make himself visible again (we never get to see the experiment which causes his affliction), constantly loses his temper and causes unrest in the inn, to the point where they try and throw him out. These scenes are wonderful, especially in the histrionic, comic relief screams of one of James Whale’s favourite actresses, Una O’Connor, as she reacts to the shenanigans going on around her. By this point, though, the chemical which Griffin has taken has began to make him mad and he hatches a new plan of world domination and murder... indeed, out of all the Universal monster characters (and it’s arguable that this is a science fiction film rather than horror but, I’m not getting into that again here) he has a huge body count in this movie, even destroying a passenger filled train at one point.

Asides from O’ Connor and Rains, there are some great actors in this. For instance, Dr. Cranley, Griffins boss, is played by Henry Travers, who film enthusiasts will probably best remember for his turn as Clarance the angel in It’s A Wonderful Life. And the former Renfield and Fritz from Dracula and Frankenstein, the brilliant character actor Dwight Frye, has a tiny part in this movie too. We also have Gloria Stuart, who was nominated for an Oscar for James Cameron’s Titanic many, many decades later, as the love interest in this movie.

And it’s a good solid film, quite pacey and with, actually, a lot of moving camera work... as the cameraman seems to incessantly follow everyone around when they enter and exit a scene, before being punctuated with the occasional static shot. It’s very dynamic though and never gets dull... even though the camera goes through vacant spaces on sets to drift from one room through the next, leaving you wondering why some of the characters feel the need to go through the connecting door.

Strangely though, it doesn’t do what a lot of the ‘invisible’ movies do and have the camera looking around at empty sets so the audience can try and spot the invisible man... something which the recent reboot (reviewed here) played with to great effect.

The film opens with a bit of scoring by Heinz Roemheld and lovers of the first of the three Flash Gordon theatrical serials will immediately recognise it (and, of course, that first Flash Gordon serial also had a few episodes where the hero turns himself invisible... picking up on some of the effects developed here). Now, this film was released a fair few months after King Kong (reviewed here), the film that allegedly brought back the art of scoring motion pictures with non-source music but, after Roemheld’s opening piece, which continues just a little way into the film for a minute or two, the majority of the rest of the film is silent in terms of music and it’s like watching an experiment progress because, after an hour and four minutes of the film has played out, the music comes back... this time as proper incidental music. And doesn’t stop until the end of the film, seven minutes later. It’s like the producers still weren’t too confident of all this ‘scoring’ malarkey when it came to ‘talking pictures’ so they figured they would only run the risk of alienating their audience towards the end of the movie. It’s good stuff though and, of course, when Whale directed The Bride Of Frankenstein, Franz Waxman’s iconic score was in full effect throughout the majority of the movie.

The Blu Ray from Universal, which comes as part of the six film box set making up their Invisible Man Legacy Collection, is well made and has all the usual extras you are probably already familiar with from previous DVD releases of the movie. The film looks absolutely brilliant and this set even has the Abbot and Costello invisible man film in it, which I don’t remember if I’ve ever seen or not. Of course, The Invisible Man himself also has a cameo in Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein but, you know, that’s another story and, of course, another review. Whichever way you cut it, though, the Blu Ray box set, like all the classic Universal Horror Legacy sets, is an absolutely ‘must have’ purchase for cinephiles and casual viewers alike. James Whale would, of course, return to direct The Bride Of Frankenstein in 1935 and that will be the next of the Universal Horror reviews I will be putting up on this blog at some point soon.

The Invisible Man (2020)

Now You See Me Too

The Invisible Man (2020)
2020 Australia/USA/Canada/UK
Directed by Leigh Whannell
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Writer/director Leigh Whannell’s new version of Universal’s franchise based on The Invisible Man is, I’m sure surprising nobody and just like many of the Universal sequels, really nothing to do with H. G. Wells original novel. That being said, the two things which both Well’s source and this movie version have in common is a central antagonist that shares the same last name as the original, Griffin and, similarly, the idea that he is an antagonist rather than protagonist... unlike the majority of the six original Universal films, is also retained.

Given director Leigh Whannell’s track record, the man who made the absolutely brilliant but still prohibitedly expensive to buy on Blu Ray movie Upgrade (reviewed by me here but, honestly, nobody wants to be paying £24 for this) you would expect that this film would be pretty good and, I have to say... yes, it really is. If you’re happy that this isn’t the same character that you knew from the 1933 version, then you should have a good time with this.

This time around, the film has been pitched firmly, it seems to me, to support the ‘me too’ movement and, although the final scenes of the movie are as troubling as the overly black and white ‘your perceived judgement of a situation trumps the possible truth of the situation’ reality of real life at the moment, there’s enough at the climax to make the ambiguity of the end game of an abusive relationship feel very true and I think it’s an extra feather in the cap for Whannell that some of the audience are going to walk out of the film with conflicting ideas as to whether justice has been served here for any of the characters.

Elisabeth Moss is absolutely fantastic in the role of abused girlfriend Cecilia Kass and she does carry the film extraordinarily well, backed up by a good supporting cast of people like Aldis Hodge and Storm Reid. Also, the film is well shot and edited but where it really comes into its own is with the sound design. This combined with Benjamin Wallfisch’s terrifically jumpy score (alas, not available on CD, only as a stupid electronic download) are what provide the film with the most scares. The film in itself, has no really big ‘fright moments’ but, due to the use of sound and music, you still get some quite intense suspense sequences in this thing.

Okay, so two standout things for me.

That sound work I just mentioned really comes into its own when, after two weeks confined in her friend’s house, Cecilia tries to brave the outside world once more by walking outside for ten seconds or so. The tension of her inner intimidation by the big, scary outside is strengthened incredibly as she puts her first foot out the door and the sound design gets suddenly muted and echoey as it does things to her footsteps. A really nice touch.

The other thing I liked about this is the way they played with modern conventions of horror which, in a way, also mimicked things Universal were doing with the series back in the 1930s and 1940s, for different reasons. That is the modern horror movie thing of the camera turning around and looking at empty rooms as you wait to spot some little detail in the shot that you know is going to scare you. It’s certainly something they would, by necessity, do in the original films in order to show you the visible signs of an invisible person being in the room... as you wait to see a tell tale foot print or a breath of cold air or a door opening. Here, though, Whannell does this purely, it seemed to me, to have fun with the modern viewer expecting to see these things. He’ll similarly focus the camera on an empty room as Cecilia is trying to see if she’s alone or not but, brilliantly, quite often does nothing with it. In the most cases, there are no indications to show there is anyone there or not... and you certainly know about it when it all kicks off. This, of course, strengthens the mood of carefully prepared paranoia which perpetually permeates the movie and I think taking this approach, at this particular time in horror film history, was a good idea.

There are some small problems I had with the movie... apart from the UK print being censored by a few seconds, ensuring that any future Blu Ray purchase from me needs to be imported from the US.

One of those problems is it’s not really a horror film. The weird science aspect of the chemical potion which gave invisibility but turned ones brain against one as it stayed in your system is gone. Instead, the lead antagonist is an optical science specialist and he’s basically wearing a stealth suit... it’s not unlike the terribly stupid car in Pierce Brosnan’s sad misstep of a Bond movie Die Another Day (reviewed by me here).

The other thing was the way it telegraphs an obvious twist in the middle of the film, where Cecilia gets a visit from a certain attorney. It totally gives away a reveal from later in the movie and I was a little disappointed that this was so blatant. However, it does lead the way for the second ending of the story and the whole problematic issue of the ‘me too’ element of the film... so I guess it’s at least good that this ‘almost twist’ is still in here. The final scenes give the film an interesting lack of clarity which may spark of debate at some point in the future, I suspect. Certainly, by the end of the movie, I would be as scared of the main protagonist as I was of the main antagonist so... yeah, I’m sure I’ll get moaned at for suggesting the ending could be read in more than one way but I suspect this was the writer’s intention.

So yeah, the new version of The Invisible Man is a pretty great time at the cinema and something I would recommend to fans of well put together suspense thrillers. A good attempt to resurrect a part of the Universal franchise.

The Monster Movies of Universal Studios

Universal Challenge

The Monster Movies
of Universal Studios
by James L. Neibaur
R & L ISBN: 978-1442278165

It’s a surprising but no belittling a factor that, in his introduction to The Monster Movies of Universal Studios, James L. Neibaur quickly explains that he has eschewed various of what I would personally say are still very much candidates for the title in favour of, purely, going through the various classic monster movies from that studio which have seen numerous releases over the past twenty years on DVD and Blu Ray and which are nowadays known to fans of that particular sub-genre as The Legacy Collection. Nothing wrong with this, of course and it certainly provides a service for those who are discovering these films in this fashion for the first time... what it does mean, however, is that films that I would personally also consider part of that loose canon... films such as The Mole People, It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula and The Monolith Monsters... especially in light of the fact of the inclusion within these pages of the Creature From The Black Lagoon cycle (not to mention three of the Abbot And Costello crossover movies), are not covered by this book. That’s okay though... perhaps we’ll get a companion volume at some point.

The book starts off by briefly reminding the reader of the climate that brought about the enthusiastic pursuit and production, originally by Carl Laemmle Jr, of these horror vehicles that assaulted the public in the early to mid 1930s and then once again throughout the 1940s in various spin offs and sequels. The success of each movie (sometimes saving Universal Studios from bankruptcy) and the downward plummeting budgets of these movies during the 1940s is subsequently recorded as each film is looked at in chronological order of release. What we have here is a chapter for each film in the recently released (and rereleased on Blu Ray) Legacy collections... so the Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy, Invisible Man and Creature From The Black Lagoon characters all have separate entries for each and every movie in their respective cycles lasting maybe 7 or 8 pages per piece. Also included is my personal favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London, along with the somehow non-horror movie She-Wolf Of London (I’ve always puzzled why this psychological thriller is included in these sets since there’s no actual monster in the movie at all) and the three Abbot and Costello films... Meet Frankenstein, Meet The Invisible Man and Meet The Mummy.

Each chapter contains a look at how the cast and crew were selected for the upcoming project, followed by a synopsis of the film and a look at how the film fared both critically and at the box office (often two polar opposites when these things were lurking at the cinema). So, for example, in the section on the first Dracula film, he talks about how it was refined down by various writers from the Balderston reboot of Stokers stage version of the novel (as opposed to the novel, on which hardly any of Dracula’s cinematic excursions have been based on) and also talks about Lugosi’s involvement in acquiring the rights from Stoker’s widow, with his subsequent lobbying and accepting of far less money than his fellow actors to secure the role which he had already made his own on stage. Neibaur goes on to make the point about the way the narrative is focused more on the story of the title character as opposed to adding in more significant back story for some of the supporting characters like Lucy, Mina and Dr. Seward, as a more modern take on the material might pursue.

For each film the author makes comments about the stylistic sensibilities of the movie in regard to placement of camera and general cinematography and, sometimes, brings up some interesting facts or observations that I was unaware of (even though I’ve read and watched a lot of documentary material on these films over the years). For instance, in the case of the original script of Cagliostro, The King Of The Dead, which was revised and evolved until it became The Mummy, I was unaware that in that original script, Cagliostro was a 3000 year old magician who remains alive by injecting himself with nitrates. And it’s also interesting to know just a little more detail in the story behind the original make-up for Werewolf Of London, where make-up artist extraordinaire Jack Pearce and actor Henry Hull clashed on how much the make-up would hide the face of the actor... with Hull going above Pearce in the food chain to get his way via the consequences of the original make up to certain things indicated in the script. It’s also interesting to note that when the studio successfully rebooted a werewolf character via The Wolf Man and its subsequent sequels, Pearce went back to his original make-up designs for Lon Chaney Jrs make-up. By the way, in case you are in any doubt, I most certainly disagree with the author’s insistence that Werewolf Of London is somehow inferior to The Wolf Man... not a bit of it.

Another little gem I don’t think I remembered or, perhaps, didn’t know but which this book brought to light is the fact that Son Of Frankenstein was being written/finished on a day by day basis as it was being shot... so I need to go back to that movie sometime soon and see if I can find any plot points or continuity moments which betray that fact. He also talks about the scene in The Mummy’s Tomb where the couple is ‘making out’ in the car but are disturbed by the sound of the film’s main antagonist going past as being the first time this had happened in the horror genre... I’m not 100% sure on that myself because there are so many films from the silent era which are lost to us but I’m happy to take him at his word until other evidence comes to light. That being said, I suspect that one of the later Mummy movies in this cycle may be the first cinematic instance of a living dead person rising up out of the earth but... I’ll get on to that when I eventually get around to rewatching that movie for this blog.

Another interesting point the author makes is that blending comedy with horror was not a new concept by the time of the 1949 movie Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein and his musings on various of the films traces the decline of the monster series', noting which films had lower budgets than each previous, why that was the case (in some instances... like the special effects budget being slashed because more money for effects were needed for a film being shot simultaneously) and also takes note, I believe, of the declining running times as the various films emerged.

He also highlights a lot of the errors in these films such as the horrible continuity problems with the time placements and, sometimes, location settings for The Mummy movies... and its kind of refreshing to hear someone else acknowledging those. He goes on to point out that the footprints in the snow of the presumably naked Claude Rains in The Invisible Man are of shoes and not feet so... yeah, I can’t believe the studio went with that solution, to be honest.

That being said... I believe the author is not above making a few errors himself. For instance, when he talks about the Frankenstein monster as being... “... a legend that most audiences knew due to the popularity of Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel.”... then surely that implies she merely popularised an already existing character, rather than fashion the whole story from clay as I believe is the case. Also, he notes that the stage version of Frankenstein gave The Monster the same name as his creator. Really? I’ve not heard that before and would have thought that, if that were the case and it such a bone of contention for people who love this character... that he is often confused with the scientist who created him... then this would be better known.

However, a few 'possible' errors do not kill a book and, although I knew a lot of the stuff covered here before, much of it gleaned from documentaries and commentary tracks, this book wins out because it is a handy guide to the ‘Universal Legacy’ monsters where all the information is gathered into one place and, also, because there is some stuff I didn’t know about in here and, yeah, that always makes a book invaluable. If you are a stranger to the movies covered in this book then I would definitely cite this tome as being a great starting place to jump on for a flavour of what these movies are all about... although it is, of course, no substitute for watching the actual films themselves. For die hard fans, though, this book is also a nice thing to have on hand to look up the quick, odd fact for when this kind of subject matter comes up in conversation, for sure. The Monster Movies of Universal Studios is a book which belongs on the shelf of any admirer of the genre and a big thank you to the coolest friend who bought me a copy of this one for my birthday. It was much appreciated.