THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE: shlock horror

Horror movies were a staple part of the output for many Hollywood studios in the 1930s and
40s. Hundreds were churned out during this period by everyone from MGM to Monogram. A few demonstrated genuine style and creativity but the vast majority were just average, produced quickly and cheaply and intended to do little more than prop up the bottom half of a double-bill at the local Roxy.
Even within this vast swathe of average horrors there were big differences in the levels of quality and originality, but few scraped so blatantly along the very bottom of these standards as 1944's THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE.
The only shocking aspect of this Columbia production is how little attention was paid to the script, acting and sets. The shoddiness shines through in every single scene, from the complete lack of emotion in the performers' delivery of their lines to the piling of horror movie cliches one a-top another, and the complete disregard for even a token attempt at plausibility in the storyline.
Set in a cramped studio-bound evocation of bomb-scarred wartime London that even Basil Rathbone's 1940s incarnation of Sherlock Holmes would struggle to recognise, the plot revolves around the return to life of a vampire intent on wreaking revenge on the scientists who drove a stake through his heart 25 years earlier.
A pasty, flabby faced Bela Lugosi, desperately in need of make-up, plays the suspiciously Dracula-like vampire Armand Tesla who masquerades as a German scientist recently rescued from a concentration camp to get close to his intended victim. She is an English lady scientist, Lady Jane Ainsley, who never lets anyone forget she's titled. In the hands of Frieda Inescort, Lady Jane appears to be the unsuspecting victim of a lobotomy which has rendered her completely unable to emote. Whether facing imminent death or consoling her upset daughter, Inescort delivers every line as if she were reading aloud a page from the telephone directory.
This total lack of emotion does, however, serve her well in her frustrating dealings with Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander). With his absolute refusal to even entertain the remote possibility that any of Lady Jane's concerns might just have some slim grounding in reality, Sir Frederick takes the character of the pigheaded policeman to new depths. Time and again he dismisses eyewitness reports and tangible evidence of supernatural goings-on with the mantra "there's a perfectly reasonable

explanation for this" without ever suggesting what that might be. He's so brazenly stupid he makes Dennis Hoey's Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes stories look like a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And don't even get me started on the short-sighted police commissioner cliches! Fleet makes copious use of every single one of them to delay the story's predictable conclusion.
If this mix were not already intoxicating enough, director Lew Landers also throws in a walking, talking werewolf able to morph from human to lycanthrope without so much as unbuttoning his jacket or loosening his tie. The effect is less scary and more an impressive piece of fancy dress.
The result of all this is a sloppy, lazy and distinctly unchilling drama that's implausible even by the already implausible standards of the vampire genre.

THE MONUMENTS MEN: a monumental disaster

THE MONUMENTS MEN is a disjointed, dull, superficial and monumentally unengaging piece of cinema.
Director, producer, co-screenwriter and star George Clooney has bitten off considerably more than he can get into his mouth, let alone chew, with this misguided attempt to tell the story of a small band of art experts operating on the frontline in post D-Day western Europe to recover some of the hundreds of thousands of art treasures looted by the Nazis.

The Allied invasion of Europe and subsequent advance across the continent towards Berlin was an enormous undertaking which doesn't easily lend itself to retelling within a 1 hour 56 minute time frame, and the film repeatedly highlights the folly of attempting to do so. The story hopscotches from the US to the UK to France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and who knows where-else in a series of disjointed stories within the story which are too short to offer anything more than a snapshot of a particular moment in a particular part of the war, and it's sometimes far from clear just which part of the war we're dropping in on.
Clooney and co-star Matt Damon breeze through the death and destruction all around them with the same nonchalance that they brought to the considerably more lightweight 'Ocean's 11/12/13' series, leaving it to a couple of their senior supporting cast (Jean Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville) to remind us that some people actually got killed in this particular escapade. The all-star cast (Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban),  the method of their recruitment into Clooney's team, and their underdeveloped characters only adds to the sensation of an 'Ocean's 11' retread with a CGI battle-devastated Europe taking the place of the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.
THE MONUMENTS MEN exudes the same kind of cinematic inauthenticity that pervades so many Hollywood studio-bound war films of the 1940s and 1950s but minus any of the style which served as those films' saving grace. Perhaps if Clooney had focused on just one of his responsibilities instead of trying to write, produce, direct and star in the thing, he might have created (or co-created) a more polished, coherent and engaging movie, but in trying to balance so many hats on his one (undeniably suave and charming) head he's given us a monumentally crashing snore-fest.