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The Bela Lugosi Collection - IGN

️Todd Gilchrist
️Sat Nov 24 2018

Like many modern moviegoers, even those with a more than passing familiarity with horror filmmaking's foundations, I was first introduced to Bela Lugosi not through his own films but Tim Burton's ode the low-budget auteur-ship Ed Wood. Of course, depending on how you look at that film, much less examine Wood's dubious real-life relationship with the screen star, some might argue that the director exploited their friendship; but the fact remains that Burton (if not also Wood) helped resuscitate the Dracula star's career - if only subliminally - so that we obsessive-compulsives and cineastes could seek out his older works and celebrate the accomplishments that preceded his turns in such camp classics as Glen of Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space.
As such, The Bela Lugosi Collection offers horror fans a unique opportunity to look back on the Hungarian actor's work during the prime of his career, featuring five movies released between 1932 and 1940. But while Lugosi himself was a magnetic presence and genuinely earned the distinction 'master of horror,' these five features - including Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, and Black Friday - are not necessarily the best showcase to reveal the depths of his memorable talent.

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The main problem with the collection is that the films just as easily could have been packaged and sold as The Boris Karloff Collection; that is, excepting 1932's Murders, all of the films feature Karloff in central roles and relegate Lugosi to second- or even sometimes third banana. That said, a few of the movies - The Black Cat in particular - are actually good in their own right, and as much provide a glimpse of old-Hollywood moviemaking as a portrait of Lugosi's own captivating, theatrical acting style.

The Black Cat features Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a scientist who returns to the site of a fierce WWI battle (where he was taken prisoner fifteen years ago) to take revenge on a former colleague, Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), with a young married couple (David Manners and Julie Bishop) in tow. At an hour and six minutes, the film is slight enough never to wear on tech-savvy modern audiences, and offers a wealth of creepiness (if few actual scares); Lugosi is believably authoritative as Wrdegast, and offers some subtle notes to make his character less a vengeance-stricken monster but a man seeking the wrong kind of redemption via this cathartic, murderous act.

In both The Invisible Ray and Black Friday, meanwhile, Lugosi scarcely generates enough screen time to be considered a significant contributor to the story. In the former, he plays a colleague of Karloff's Dr. Benet who discovers that the scientist has been poisoned by his own discovery, a mysterious element dubbed 'Radium X' that offers cure-alls for a number of ailments (including blindness, apparently). Eventually succumbing to madness, Dr. Benet decides to kill the other members of the party who aided his discovery, but Lugosi intervenes and helps the authorities apprehend the murderous madman.

Black Friday finds only a cameo for Lugosi, this time playing a gangland boss who finds himself swept up in an improbable conspiracy between a doctor (Karloff again) and an old friend (Stanley Ridges) whose brain is replaced with that of a gangster, who left behind $500,000 after being fatally injured by the cops (you know - that old chestnut). Though he appears several times in film, Lugosi offers little more than occasional Hungarian gravitas (he's almost invariably a stronger presence than anyone in the film except Karloff) while the machinations of the plot spiral outward towards the extremes of scientific paranoia (much less gangster-movie scene-chewing).

All of these films speak more to the general ignorance of the moviegoing public during Lugosi's heyday than his personal lasting impact on horror movies or filmmaking in general. Rife with themes about the inevitable befouling of scientific discovery, and the fear of technology in general, The Bela Lugosi Collection is very much a product of its era, and in many ways holds only tangential parallels to our modern age of monster movies, twisted tales and stories of science gone awry. At the same time, audiences who are more receptive to the theatrical element of early filmmaking may find much to enjoy here; while some folks prefer their scares ensconced in graphic violence and wall-to-wall viscera, these films possess a sort of repressed, austere but deeply evocative theatricality that chills much more deeply than the facile frights of today's shock cinema.

Overall, however, the central shortcoming with this set is that Lugosi far too seldom enjoys a central focus in the films selected, and has few opportunities to let his Hungarian charms shine (thus selling him as more than Ed Wood's tragic, drug-addled stunt-casting lead actor). But for those who enjoy old horror movies, including the Frankenstein, Mummy and Creature From the Black Lagoon collections, this serves as a slight but occasionally satisfying set piece. And even if you don't usually dig Universal's 1930s creature features and earliest creepshows, start with this disc of b-movies as a buffer between cinema classics and enjoy a well-deserved scream of laughter to go along with the ones found from being properly frightened.

Score: 6 out of 10

The Video

While the films collected here could no doubt have benefited from a full-fledged remastering, removing image grain and debris to make for a smoothly scary moviewatching experience, all in all they look pretty good. All five films are presented in their original 4:3 aspect ratio and thankfully have not been colorized other otherwise injured by so-called digital 'enhancement.' Sometimes quality varies from shot to shot - even in the same scene - but overall the images are almost satisfactorily unpolished; as mentioned above, these are not necessarily Universal's top-notch horror releases (some of them barely stray into the genre at all), so it comes as little surprise that the presentation leaves a little bit to be desired.

Score: 6 out of 10

The Audio

All of the films feature the same audio option - English Dolby Digital 2.0 - and truth be told they don't need anything better: in all cases the stories are confined to fairly limited stage direction, and even the wide shots (such as external shots of Poelzig's castle in The Black Cat) are properly accompanied - and better served - by score rather than some reimagining of the weather or environmental conditions by modern-day foley artists. Dialogue and sound effects, minimal though the latter may be, are cleanly rendered, and offer a Phil Spector-ish aural landscape (that is, a wall of sound) that works effectively to evoke the atmospheric (rather than shock-based) scares that form these films' foundations.

Additionally, the disc provides English captions and French and Spanish subtitles for the hearing impaired.

Score: 5 out of 10

The Extras

The five films are collected together on one dual-sided disc, which under normal circumstances might present transfer or image problems. Since the material is old - and usually runs only a few minutes longer than an hour - this proves to be no problem. The disc is packaged in a plastic and cardboard tray with a slipcase.

The disc offers almost nothing in the way of extras, and quite frankly even a collection of talent bios would be welcome since we know little about many of the actors who appear alongside Lugosi in these movies. Admittedly, there's probably little in the way of interview footage with cast or crew that is available, but a commentary by a film historian or Lugosi biographer/ expert would have offered some valuable insights into why these films are superlative examples of his talent (if in fact they do).

They have assembled theatrical trailers for three of the five films (Murders, Invisible Ray and Black Friday), but otherwise the reason to buy this set is for the films themselves.

Score: 1 out of 10