Cheap Night of the Living Dead/Human Monster (Video) (Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea) (George A. Romero) Price

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Customer Reviews of Night of the Living Dead/Human Monster

The film is good, but as I said - my edition isn`t on par of what I`ve been told of other editions of this film. We all know of Bela Lugosi, but u better catch GRETA GYNT(1916-2000) in the films DEAR MURDERER 1947-as the neurotic Vivien - married 2 a man called Lee(humoursely - Vivien Leigh - VIVIAN MARY HARTLEY - got her professional name from HER husband, Leigh Holman) and the Ronald Neame-Hithcock-thriller TAKE MY LIFE 1947 as an operasinger, trying 2 catch a real killer when her own husband is suspcted of foul behaviour.

But this is DARK EYES OF LONDON - the film that MADE her :-)

50-50
The two films on this DVD proved exactly the opposite of what I expected. I bought the disc because the story of THE MYSTERY LINER sounded intriguing. I assumed THE HUMAN MONSTER would be a lackluster Lugosi vehicle with little to recommend it. In fact, MONSTER is the more entertaining of the two, with some surprisingly fluid filmmaking and lots of left over German Expressionist touches that always seem to work. LINER, on the other hand, feels like little more than a few ideas barely tied together by a strip of film. If the people who made it took more than one take on each shot, I'd be amazed.

Not that either film is exactly a masterpiece. They are definitely for connoisseurs of low-budget filmmaking, and only to the extent you are willing to accept that the effort to uncover hidden treasures from the past occasionally yields only fool's gold. The story of MONSTER is hammily obvious. The filmmakers don't even make any effort to hide the identity of the villain. The credit sequence features Lugosi's eyes scowling over the type, and just in case you didn't get it, he orders the murder of a character in his second scene. The pleasures the film provides are in the marginal details, like the work house for the blind practically dripping with damp decay, or the blind ANDmute beggar with the heart of gold or his loyal, if murderous, best friend, who has a severe speech impediment and a face like a bargain-basement Frankenstein's monster. (This guy would never arouse suspicion walking down the street, no, no way.)

MYSTERY LINER, on the other hand, is grindingly mundane, with few of the flourishes of the Lugosi film. There are some half-hearted efforts to create a kind of Mastermind surrounded by test tubes, oscillators and bunsen burners, while weird, very low-budget science-fiction effects bubble around him. But the story makes even less sense than MONSTER. It has something to do with a device to control ships at sea remotely. Our Man of the Oscillators is out to steal this from the rightful owners. The Captain of the ship has been made half-insane because the Bad Guys know they have to get rid of him to pull off their scheme. Meanwhile there's this old woman passenger making passes at every man on board, and a nurse who is in love (I think) with one of the officers, and a suspicious passenger with a thickly Germanic accent, and an obnoxious one who seems, for obscure reasons, to be in a position to tell everyone else what to do. When, after a dreary hour plus of struggling with this under cooked stew, the story unexpectedly, almost inexplicably, comes to a halt, you're not even quite sure what happened. Not that it really matters much. The problem is that we don't get the delights of cut-rate virtuosity, just the obvious signs of tenth-rate talents laboring very heavily to make a dime yield a dollar and not even getting a nickel.

Both films, however, have the virtue of just about every other grade-Z film from this period: they're mercifully short.