Friday 8 January 2016

Quality and Hollywood Formula B Movies - The Vampire’s Coffin Review



Quality and Hollywood Formula B Movies - The Vampire’s Coffin Review

The vampire’s coffin (1958) is about – who would have guessed – vampires. It’s atypical 1950’s B Movie shot in black and white and sometimes so dark that it’s hard to see anything at all but nonetheless they really tried to make the monster convincing. The music is very sensational and contributes a lot to the film (i.e. makes it hilarious not boring) and the characters act in the typical over dramatized way you would expect from a play, not a film, but it works.

The special effects consist of a shadow of a man changing into a bat and then with stop motion, flying towards the camera. If the viewer is fully engrossed it might even look believable, unlike the giant claw film where the monster unfortunately turned out to be just hideous.

No one seems to take themselves seriously in the cast so a film that is not meant to be funny has a certain element of humour to it, which adds to the entertainment of today’s viewers.

The film is redeemed by actually having an amusing plot, the music making everything worthwhile, the acting, seemingly coming from people that worked on stage before is nicely over pronounced and would be enjoyable on a very small screen too, the bat is great to watch (it even flaps its wings) and the female lead only faints once.

All together the vampire’s coffin is a film of its time but not too bad as far as 1950’s B Movies go and it is certainly enjoyable in the right set of mind. Unlike the producer intended though, it’s not scary to nowadays standards and therefore not really a horror film.

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