Category Archives: From the Vaults

I am just about the last person on earth to see Fritz Lang's "Metropolis." And I chose to break my fast with a nice long incarnation of it: the newly restored 145-minute version, recently shown for the third time by … Continue reading →

Well, Joe Dante's horror classic "The Howling" was not at all what I expected! Every werewolf movie is necessarily idiosyncratic, of course — it's not like "Dracula" or "Frankenstein," with an established storyline and characters to follow or riff on. … Continue reading →

Nope, not the Guy Pearce version from 2002, lovely as he and his cheekbones may be. This is the classic adaptation directed by George Pal, who'd adapted H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" a few years earlier. Wells' "The Time … Continue reading →

What an odd yet pleasing little film is “The Woman Who Came Back.” A New England woman returns to her hometown and, after a near-death incident, becomes afraid that she’s under the spell of a famous local witch. It’s like … Continue reading →

Is there anything new to say about "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"? Not really, but Halloween is a time for classics. And the best thing about this silent landmark of German expressionism is how magnificently new it still looks. Grainy … Continue reading →

 Lucy Van Pelt: How about cats? If you’re afraid of cats, you have ailurophasia. Charlie Brown: Well, sort of, but I’m not sure. Actually, the word is “ailurophobia,” and Bela Lugosi’s character suffers it intensely in “The Black Cat” — … Continue reading →

Happy autumnal equinox, my scrappy yet plucky band of readers! The unmistakable slant of fall light is upon us now, even in the 90-degree afternoons, and with it comes my very favorite season for movie watching. Which means I have … Continue reading →

Well, I am fudging on the year again this week, mostly because I had 1941's "The Wolf Man" in my queue and felt like watching it. And here at From the Vaults, that means I felt like writing about it! … Continue reading →

"Portrait in Black" has just about everything you need for a campy good time: Sandra Dee! Lana Turner in an increasingly elaborate selection of diamond earrings! A very tan Anthony Quinn! Former silent film actress Anna May Wong as a … Continue reading →

Why, it’s another movie by Ernst Lubitsch! And it could not be more different from the stately silent film we looked at last week. (My God, it’s almost like this was planned.) A classic comedy of manners, “The Shop Around … Continue reading →

There's not much reason to watch Ernst Lubitsch's silent historical epic "Anna Boleyn" (which Netflix informs me is also called "Deception"), unless you're, say, a movie blogger who has set herself the cussed task of watching only films from 1920, … Continue reading →

*claps hands to face, shakes feathered hair, screams* I'm sorry! I meant to do this last week. Larry pitched this idea when he first started running posts from 1980, and I thought "ooh, there's a Friday the 13th in August" … Continue reading →

People with funeral fetishes, I have got the movie for you, and it is Roger Corman’s “House of Usher.” (Yes, I am beaming affectionately at you, my dear goth friends.) The first in a rash of Corman films taken from … Continue reading →

Returning to earlier themes of Cary Grant and wife-swapping, this week we have "My Favorite Wife," a screwball comedy. As usual with this genre, your mood will determine whether you find the antics hilarious or simply trying. So if you … Continue reading →

Well, "Watcher in the Woods"  is certainly an odd film. Starring Bette Davis and the radiant, fresh-off-of-"Ice Castles" Lynn-Holly Johnson, it hails from an era of vaguely dark and weird Disney films: "The Black Hole" had come out the previous … Continue reading →

All I knew about this movie going in was that it had been remade with Mark Hamill in 1995 (the remake also starred Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley, and was respectably directed by John Carpenter, but in 1995 all my … Continue reading →

How can you possibly go wrong with Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy? The sad truth is that you can. Mr. Darcy isn't hard to get right, in my opinion — all he has to do is be terribly rude — … Continue reading →