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Elvira’s Movie Macabre (1981–86).At the end of a long corridor, a door creaks open to reveal a blinding light and a thick fog. The figure of a woman appears, as if from the beyond. Foreboding organ music accompanies her sashay toward us, cobwebs breaking against her ample curves. Lightning cracks, a wolf howls, and we are delivered to the black void of a soundstage, illuminated by gothic candelabras, with a red Victorian couch at its center, on which Elvira lounges, cooing little come-ons and giggling at her own jokes as she introduces this week’s feature, Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973).Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira is part Sunset Strip stand-up comedian, part Southern belle, part self-effacing ditz, and part glamorous Hollywood host. Peterson conceived of her as a vampiric bombshell with a valley-girl punk affect and a Ronette’s mass of teased-up hair. Her dress was short, black, and low-cut,...

Some of the best movies to watch during the Halloween season (and some of the coolest movies in the horror genre) are the classic Universal Monsters movies. Those awesome black and white movies that were built around characters like Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, among others. So now that Halloween weekend is upon us, we here at Arrow in the Head have put together a list: Universal Monsters Franchises Ranked! Below you’ll find our rankings of the classic franchises, from least to favorite. Check it out, and let us know how you would rank these franchises by leaving a comment!

Honorable Mention: Abbott And Costello

The comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello certainly weren’t Universal monsters (or any other kind of monsters), but they earn an honorable mention on this list because they played an...

Universal Horror Collection Volume 5

Blu ray

1943, 1944, 1945, 1941 / 61, 61, 63, 64 min.

Starring Ellen Drew, John Carradine, Acquanetta

Cinematography by George Robinson, Jack MacKenzie, Maury Gertsman, Victor Milner

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, Reginald Le Borg, Harold Young, Stuart Heisler

The Universal Horror Collection Volume 5 should appeal to ape suit fans everywhere—and spoiler alert—one of the films in the set is genuinely good, a lyrical genre-buster that is as inventive as it is poignant.

That movie, The Monster and the Girl, shares space with a trio of bottom-rung potboilers concerning the misadventures of Paula Dupree, a beautiful circus performer with the bad habit of changing into a monster—though she’s not “changing” so much as reverting to her true nature; Paula is a deracinated gorilla given human form by a not-so-mad doctor The statuesque Aquanetta plays Paula and, except for some grunts and growls in her ape state, her’s is a completely mute performance.

Cinema Retro has received the following press release:

Universal Horror Collection Vol. 5 will scream to life on Blu-ray on June 16 from Scream Factory.

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The collection includes four tales of terror from the archives of Universal Pictures, the true home of classic horror. A mobster's brain is transplanted into an ape who carries out his revenge in The Monster And The Girl. A mad scientist turns an ape into a beautiful, but deadly woman in Captive Wild Woman. Jungle Woman, the sequel to Captive Wild Woman, is an eerie thriller with all the danger of wild animals on the loose and a sexy killer on the prowl! And in The Jungle Captive, a scientist has experimented on re-animating animals ... but now he has decided to go one step further and re-animate a human!

Universal Horror Collection Vol. 5 Includes:

The Monster And The Girl

Special...

CineSavant contributor and advisor Gary Teetzel revisits a film he reviewed for us seventeen years ago. Instead of continuing to play his greatest role for Universal, Bela Lugosi ‘returns’ as a generic vampire in a very Dracula-like tale for Columbia. He’s still the best fiend for the role. The show introduces a novel demise for Lugosi’s creature of the undead, plus a furry-faced werewolf to compete with Universal’s Wolf Man… a werewolf that talks.

The Return of the Vampire

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1943 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 69 min. / Street Date February 19, 2019 / 27.99

Starring: Bela Lugosi, Frieda Inescort, Nina Foch, Roland Varno, Miles Mander, Matt Willis, Ottola Nesmith, Gilbert Emery.

Cinematography: L.W. O’Connell, John Stumar

Film Editor: Paul Borofsky

Original Music: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Written by Griffin Jay, Randall Faye, Kurt Neumann

Produced by Sam White

Directed by Lew Landers

Reviewed by Gary Teetzel

For Bela Lugosi, Hollywood’s...

Brains on Ice! week kicks off at Trailers from Hell with director and Tfh creator Joe Dante introducing Universal's 1943 film "Captive Wild Woman," starring John Carradine as a mad doctor who transforms a circus ape into doe-eyed sex-bomb Acquanetta via a brain swap.A sci-fi twist on Universal’s popular wolfman cycle, this was the first in a trio of ‘Paula the Ape-woman’ movies (including Jungle Woman and Jungle Captive). Resourcefully directed by former editor Edward Dmytryk, who structures his low budget thrills around circus footage from Kurt Neumann’s 1933 The Big Cage. Even with all that extra padding, the whole thing tops out to a zippy 61 minutes of gorilla-girl action.

A-Lad-In His Lamp was a 1948 Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoon that had showed an aerial map depicting two bodies of water named Veronica Lake and Turhan Bay. This probably seemed clever 64 years ago but later generations of kids catching it on TV most likely missed the joke. Born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Sahultavy in Austria in 1922, Turhan Bey was dubbed “The Turkish Delight” by his fans and the movie mags. He costarred with exotic Dominican-born actress Maria Montez in seven films including Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves and Sudan. His is an especially sad passing for monster kids as Bey was just about the last living link to The Golden Age of Universal’s Horror films, having starred in The Mad Ghoul, Captive Wild Woman, and opposite Lon Chaney in The Mummy’S Tomb. Bey left Hollywood in 1949 to return to his native Vienna, working as a photographer. However, he...

Friend, killer, lover, specimen ...

The guinea pig

Cinema persistently tries to achieve what science so far has not: make a man/monkey mashup. In The Doctor's Experiment; or Reversing Darwin's Theory (1908) men are turned into apes, while in Balaoo the Demon Baboon (1913, twice remade) a doctor has a go at the reverse, with the side-effect of turning them murderous. In 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, women are injected with ape blood (they die); in Return of the Ape Man (1944) Bela Lugosi swaps John Carradine's brain with that of a gorilla (again, doesn't go well). The Man Without a Body (1957) tells of an impressionable gent who submits to the ministrations of a scientist who has been seeing what happens when you play switcheroo with monkey heads.

The erotic cipher

King Kong resonates because, much as Kong repels us, we empathise too: who hasn't been rejected by the object of...