But verily, the sad hand of cheap-ass commerce has left its fingerprints all over this next pair. So if the question is "Should I watch the Mill Creek versions of these movies?", the answer is most assuredly "I don't think so."
(But maybe it'd help to have some Dunk-a-roos to snack on. Or Hulkaroos for that matter, if you're feeling especially Minnesotan.)
The Ape Man (1943)
Objective Grade: D
Hairy Hungarian Bonus: C+
Poor Print Penalty: F
Inevitably there's a degree of pathos associated with seeing Béla Lugosi wasting his talents in a piece of silly dreck like The Ape Man. But unlike some of his later roles, the charismatic Hungarian still has enough physical presence to pull this one off -- which, paradoxically enough, makes it easier to laugh at the whole thing.
In fact, the makers of The Ape Man encourage us to laugh right from the start, and we're not merely talking about anachronistic double-entendres like "After today, you'll be shooting that one-eyed monster of yours for Uncle Sam." Maybe they wanted to hedge their bets, aware that the premise of The Ape Man was so risible, and Béla's makeup so ridiculous, that even schoolchildren might find the whole thing laughable.
What seals the deal: from the very beginning of the film, an enigmatic man lurks in almost every scene -- sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes as a participant. By the time we find out who this goofy, creepy, Ryan Stiles-esque figure is, it signifies that The Ape Man has, once and for all, abandoned all pretense of sincerity. (Meta was by no means an invention of the late 1990s, folks.)
We're assuming you don't need us to tell you that Béla's a scientist on the brink of insanity, or that a spunky female reporter is one of the protagonists, or that there's a gorilla in the basement. Such things, you understand, are de rigueur.
Why you shouldn't watch this print:
While the picture on this copy isn't too bad, the audio is positively, absolutely atrocious. It's terribly muffled, but even if you try to compensate with EQ, what's left is far too damaged to work with. As a result, much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, and we were lucky to understand 50% of what was said, even after multiple replays.
What to watch instead:
Look no further than the wonderful Archive.org, which has a downloadable copy of The Ape Man with much, much better sound quality.
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)
Grade: D+
Markdown for the Mangling of Motivation (and Milk): F
Poor Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen). He's nobility, he's filthy rich and he's handsome, but he just can't get over his late wife Evelyn. Part of the problem is that he has an odd approach to grieving: whenever he sees a certain kind of redhead, he has to have her...
...and then he has to kill her.
...and then he has to kill her.
The title of this movie tells us that things will get even messier in the Evelyn department, and indeed they do. What's less clear is whether any of it makes any sense, and on second viewing the whole thing seems all the more creaky and indulgent (bordering on incoherent).
To distract us from the silliness of the narrative, we get an array of visual stimuli including not-so-sexy dancers, groovy hippie bands, and fleet foxes. But unlike some other films (e.g. Kiss Me Kill Me), The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave doesn't have enough style (or eye candy) to engross the viewer on that basis alone.
But does the Mill Creek copy give us sufficient basis to form a judgment? Read on for the answer.
Why you shouldn't watch this print:
OK, the image is perennially blurry and/or washed-out, and some of the nighttime scenes are tough to make out. That's to be expected, and if you can't tolerate VHS quality, you have no business buying Mill Creek boxsets. But a good 15-20 minutes have been edited out of this copy, mostly (we assume) to cut out nudity.
However, the excised material wasn't just T&A, but also included crucial dialogue that explains Alan's murderous behavior, as well a key scene involving a missing glass of milk (in the edited version they allude to this, with no context whatsoever). With it intact, the film makes one hell of a lot more sense.
What to watch instead:
We're not going to link to it, but an unedited, full-length, widescreen copy of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is on YouTube. It's in Italian, but has an option for English-language subtitles, and looks light-years better than the Mill Creek copy, especially in the darker scenes. It made us say things like "Colors!" and "Contrast!", which are words we don't get to say much under the Umbrellahead umbrella.
Oddly, this post on IMDb made us expect an alternate ending, but either that person's imagining things or it's simply not in this version, because the ending was the same as the Mill Creek copy.
As a side note, we've finally caught up with our backlog of reviews, which dated back to 2011 (!) when we resumed posting earlier this month. We're planning to review one more movie we watched quite recently (a non-Mill Creek affair that mostly seems to have been forgotten by the Internet), and we'll also do a brief recap of the 50 Horror Classics subset that spanned from Carnival of Souls to Phantom from 10,000 Leagues.
As a side note, we've finally caught up with our backlog of reviews, which dated back to 2011 (!) when we resumed posting earlier this month. We're planning to review one more movie we watched quite recently (a non-Mill Creek affair that mostly seems to have been forgotten by the Internet), and we'll also do a brief recap of the 50 Horror Classics subset that spanned from Carnival of Souls to Phantom from 10,000 Leagues.
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