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Staring down his prey with sunken eyes and a sinister smile, Alastair Sim was the fiend Charles Addams never got around to drawing. Sim was a quick-change artist who didn’t need makeup to transform from a grasping monster into your favorite uncle – it’s why he remains the greatest interpreter of Ebenezer Scrooge. Whether playing a cold-blooded assassin in The Green Man or a kindly army chaplain in Folly to be Wise he understood as well as anyone why the masks of tragedy and comedy are intertwined.

Sim is one of those figures who’s been consigned to the history books for decades. But by releasing a Blu ray set of the great man’s comedies in 2020, Film Movement Classics, like Scrooge, hasn’t lost their senses – they’ve come to them.

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter

Blu ray

Film Movement Classics

1954, ’60, ’51, ’47 / 1.67:1, 1.37:1 / 86, 97, 93, 82 min.

Starring Alastair Sim,...

Nowhere to Go (1958) starts well, with an almost nine-minute prison break sequence that's highly unusual because it shows someone breaking into a prison. In this case it's Bernard Lee (M in James Bond) who's the one scaling the wall. Bold? Perhaps...but it certainly sets the tone for what is surely an eventful film...

George Nader plays suave conman Paul Gregory, who latches onto wealthy widow Harriet Johnson because she has a rare coin collection. Posing as a playwright stuck on 'the second act' he arranges the sale of her coins, insisting that he be paid on her behalf in cash for the £50,000. At this point, I could delve further into the plot but...well...I think you can guess the rest.

Jazz fans will enjoy the jazz score by British star Dizzy Reece. Non-jazz fans like me might find it grating at times. Do not watch this movie if you've got a headache.

As one YouTube user so eloquently puts it: “Ingrid Pitt, you can bite my neck with pleasure.” The Polish actress and star of films like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, died on 23 November, just two days after celebrating her 73rd birthday. Sadly, it turns out that all the fake blood she imbibed over the years didn’t make her immortal. Fortunately, her screen image was so indelible that she’ll live on in the hearts and minds of horror fans.

Fittingly, Pitt who was born Ingoushka Petrov, made her screen debut in the obscure 1964 Spanish film El sonido de la muerte, which was known in the Us as Sound of Horror. From the brief clip I’ve seen, it would appear that the budget only stretched as far as providing some very unconvincing dinosaur sound effects. Still, even horror queens have to start somewhere.

After uncredited appearances in Doctor Zhivago...

Hello, monster mavens. Let me introduce myself to all you cognescenti of the creepy.

I’m Max Cheney, better known by my onscreen moniker of “The Drunken Severed Head.” I’ve been given some space here to write about many things: the intersection of the screen and the scream, the mad monsters of movies and magazines, the art of alternate worlds and the dark denizens of the diabolic. In short, if it’s something that belongs in the dark, I’ll talk about it here. I’ve been taking a cockeyed look at such stuff for over three years at my blog (the winner of a Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award, he said modestly), and now I’m happy to have more corners to explore at Famous Monsters.

If you want to know more about me (and perhaps you’re just strange enough to), I was interviewed for Famous Monsters,...