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Dracula [VHS]

Dracula [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Bela Lugosi , Helen Chandler , David Manners , Dwight Frye , Edward Van Sloan
Director: Karl Freund , Tod Browning
When Universal Pictures picked up the movie rights to a Broadway adaptation of Dracula, they felt secure in handing the property over to the sinister team of actor Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning. But Chaney died of cancer, and Universal hired the Hungarian who had scored a success in the stage play: Béla Lugosi. The resulting film launched both Lugosi's baroque career and the horror-movie cycle of the 1930s. It gets off to an atmospheric start, as we meet Count Dracula in his shadowy castle in Transylvania, superbly captured by the great cinematographer Karl Freund. Eventually Dracula and his blood-sucking devotee (Dwight Frye, in one of the cinema's truly mad performances) meet their match in a vampire-hunter called Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan). If the later sections of the film are undeniably stage bound and a tad creaky, Dracula nevertheless casts a spell, thanks to Lugosi's creepily lugubrious manner and the eerie silences of Browning's directing style. (After a mood-enhancing snippet of Swan Lake under the opening titles, there is no music in the film.) Frankenstein, which was released a few months later, confirmed the horror craze, and Universal ...
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Black Cat (1941) [VHS]

Black Cat (1941) [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Basil Rathbone , Hugh Herbert , Broderick Crawford , Bela Lugosi , Gale Sondergaard
Director: Albert S. Rogell

List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $5.50
Mark of the Vampire

Mark of the Vampire

Staring: Bela Lugosi , Lionel Barrymore , Lionel Atwill , Jeah Hersholt , Donald Meek
Director: Tod Browning
Classic (and relatively rare!) 1935 horror gem featuring Bela Lugosi as the title bloodsucker...though it was impossible for this MGM film to call him Dracula because the rights to that name were locked up by Universal. Lionel Barrymore is tobilled. Tod Browning (yes, the director of Universal's DRACULA) is behind the camera.
Our Price: $4.88
Wolf Man (1941) [VHS]

Wolf Man (1941) [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Claude Rains , Warren William , Ralph Bellamy , Patric Knowles , Bela Lugosi
Director: George Waggner
Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.

If you haven't heard this piece of horror-movie doggerel before, you'll never forget it after seeing The Wolf Man for two reasons: it's a spooky piece of rhyme and nearly everybody in the picture recites it at one time or another. Set in a fog-bound studio-built Wales, The Wolf Man tells the doom-laden tale of Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who returns to the estate of his wealthy father (Claude Rains). (Yes, Chaney's American, but the movie explains this, awkwardly.) Bitten by a werewolf, Talbot suffers the classic fate of the victims of lycanthropy: at the full moon, he turns into a werewolf, a transformation ingeniously devised by makeup maestro Jack Pierce. Pierce was the man who turned Boris Karloff into the Frankenstein monster, and his werewolf makeup became equally famous, with its canine snout and bushy hairdo--and, of course, seriously sharp dental work. The Wolf Man was a smash hit, giving Universal Pictures a new monster for their already crowded stable, and Chaney found himself follo...
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Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman [VHS]

Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Ilona Massey , Patric Knowles , Lionel Atwill , Bela Lugosi , Maria Ouspenskaya
Director: Roy William Neill
Over 10 years after first turning down the role, Bela Lugosi donned the neck bolts and platform boots to play Frankenstein's monster for the first and only time in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr., reprising his most famous role), killed at the end of The Wolf Man, is inexplicably alive and searching for the brilliant Dr. Frankenstein but instead finds the Monster, frozen in ice beneath the castle, and an ambitious scientist (Patric Knowles) who revives the creature and promises to cure Larry. Lugosi is lurching and clumsy as the Monster, while Chaney is appropriately tortured as Larry but stiff and snarly as the Wolf Man, more man than wolf. Last-minute cuts by the studio renders much of the film incomprehensible: the monster was left blind and vocal at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein, but all references to either were deleted (which partly accounts for Lugosi's performance) and he's now sighted but mute. Roy William Neill, a talented B-movie director best known for his Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone, can't do much with the perfunctory script, but he does deliver a highly entertaining conclusion: the Wolf Man battles the...
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Night Monster [VHS]

Night Monster [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Bela Lugosi , Lionel Atwill , Leif Erickson , Irene Hervey , Ralph Morgan
Director: Ford Beebe

List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $39.99
Island of Lost Souls [VHS]

Island of Lost Souls [VHS]

Rated: Unrated
Staring: Charles Laughton , Bela Lugosi , Richard Arlen , Leila Hyams , Kathleen Burke
Director: Erle C. Kenton
When you've got Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, how can you go wrong? Shipwreck victim Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) is stranded on an island run by the mysterious Dr. Moreau (Laughton). Moreau is hospitable enough, but the jungle is full of menacing shapes--and what about those ominous references to the House of Pain? Parker gradually learns of Moreau's unholy experiments and worries that he'll never escape. Though it has aged a bit, Island of Lost Souls is surprisingly spine-tingling, particularly the horrifying climax. Light and shadows are used especially well--occasionally, Moreau speaks with his face entirely hidden, except for his glittering eyes. Laughton turns in yet another superbly evil performance and even the somewhat worse-for-wear Lugosi is creepy as the pronouncer of the law. ("Are we not men?" Well, no, not exactly.) This is a nicely chilling classic that may even make you think twice about modern science's experimentation with genetics. Don't miss it. Remade as The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1977 and 1996. --Ali Davis
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Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein [VHS]

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein [VHS]

Rated: Unrated
Staring: Bud Abbott , Lou Costello , Lon Chaney Jr. , Bela Lugosi , Glenn Strange
Director: Charles Barton
Universal Pictures made a great deal of money from its monster movies in the 1930s. In the early '40s, the burlesque team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello kept the studio's coffers full. When the two franchises were combined in 1948, the result was another windfall--despite the apparent oil-and-water mix of subject matter. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was the first of these summit meetings, although the title is a misnomer. Actually, Bud and Lou bump into most of the Universal heavy-hitters, including Count Dracula (played by Béla Lugosi himself), the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.), and the Frankenstein monster (veteran monster Glenn Strange). There's even a token appearance by the Invisible Man, whose disembodied voice is recognizable as that of Vincent Price. Sure enough, the film is funny, especially since it gives the portly Costello multiple opportunities to do his wide-eyed, quivering scaredy-cat routine. Audiences ate it up, and in future installments Bud and Lou would run into Boris Karloff, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and the Mummy. But the first was the best. --Robert Horton
List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $9.25
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein [VHS]

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Bud Abbott , Lou Costello , Lon Chaney Jr. , Bela Lugosi , Glenn Strange
Director: Charles Barton
Universal Pictures made a great deal of money from its monster movies in the 1930s. In the early '40s, the burlesque team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello kept the studio's coffers full. When the two franchises were combined in 1948, the result was another windfall--despite the apparent oil-and-water mix of subject matter. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was the first of these summit meetings, although the title is a misnomer. Actually, Bud and Lou bump into most of the Universal heavy-hitters, including Count Dracula (played by Béla Lugosi himself), the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.), and the Frankenstein monster (veteran monster Glenn Strange). There's even a token appearance by the Invisible Man, whose disembodied voice is recognizable as that of Vincent Price. Sure enough, the film is funny, especially since it gives the portly Costello multiple opportunities to do his wide-eyed, quivering scaredy-cat routine. Audiences ate it up, and in future installments Bud and Lou would run into Boris Karloff, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and the Mummy. But the first was the best. --Robert Horton
List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $14.50
Black Cat [VHS]

Black Cat [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Boris Karloff , Bela Lugosi , David Manners , Julie Bishop , Egon Brecher
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Edgar Ulmer's baroque masterpiece is the pinnacle of expressionism of Hollywood, a beautiful melding of gothic antiquity and modernity in the shadow of World War I. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff square off in their finest film together as decades-old nemeses who meet for a fateful showdown on the very battlefield where Karloff's devilish dark priest sacrificed his own army and framed Lugosi's good doctor for the crime. Karloff plays the most evil character of his career, a mesmerizingly demonic architect (inspired by the notorious real-life Satanist Aleister Crowley) who stole Lugosi's wife and daughter and built his shrinelike home, a stunning piece of Bauhaus-inspired glass and steel architecture, on the graves of his victims. His intensity and hypnotic understatement is a revelation, a genuine monster in human guise far more insidious and evil than the creatures of Universal's more famous horror classics. Lugosi delivers his finest performance ever as a Van Helsing-like hero whose simmering hatred and rage finally boils over into madness and sadistic revenge. A pair of silly American honeymooners become but two more pawns in their game of vengeance. John Mescall, who shot the ...
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