Human Monster/ Mystery Liner (Roan Group Horror Classics #7)

 

 

                          Picture:   Sound:   Extras:   Film

Human Monster     C-           D          C+        C

Mystery Liner        C-          C+         C-         B

 

 

Human Monster (1940, U.S.) aka Dark Eyes of London (England) is like a descent X-files episode.  A movie like this does not require color images to entertain an audience.  Most of the action uses darkness and shadows to tell a story.  The makeup used was great as expected. Though, I prefer Bela Lugosi in his more well-known films.  It moves along slowly, but has a nice plot twist involving the blind helper Jake.  One interesting note was in Britain, no one under 16 was allowed to see this film without supervision.  Apparently, they had a Horror ban in England from 1937-38.  The good thing about horror films is that they hold up better because they're not super campy like most films of the late 30's and early 40's.

 

The standard 1.33 X 1 image is bad, the print is scratched throughout.  It looks to be mastered from a print they used in the theatre.  I was receiving 6 mbps average on the video.  The audio is highly compressed.  It was difficult to understand the dialogue even with the sound turned up.  This made it difficult to understand what was going on in some sections.  The audio was running at 192 kbps, which is not much.  I'm sure they had enough room to increase the bit rate but since this disc was produced in 1999, but most companies didn't realize the bit rate mattered.  The good news is that they put together a nice extras package for a movie of this age and obscurity.  The trailers are included along with cast/credit/production notes and an original U.S. introduction of the movie.  The information in the notes were well done and informative/interesting.

 

Mystery Liner (1934) is a mystery movie with a dash of Sci-Fi.  It would benefit from a color image but the B&W movie has a good story and a fast-paced storyline.  The run time is short (just over an hour) as is typical for a B-movie.  I found that I definitely enjoyed this film more than Human Monster even though it's the secondary feature on the disc.  Zeffie Tilbury played Granny Plimpton in a fun role that had me chuckling more than once.  Once she boarded the ship, I thought I was watching any good actress from today’s films.  She was really good.   Astrid Allwyn as Lila Kane was in a 20's-ish damsel in distress role love-triangle.  Also, Gabby Hayes is in the film.  In the beginning of the film is a scene with the crew activating the remote control for the ship.  It is cool how they did it and to see how they thought of advanced technology back in the day.  They show a laboratory with a lot of sparks and kind-of Frankenstein type stuff being activated.

 

The standard 1.33 x 1 image is bad, print is scratched throughout.  Same quality as other film on the disc.  The video was coming in at 7.5 mbps avg., mostly because of all the white images.  The audio was compressed but more intelligible than Human Monster's tracks.  I didn't have trouble hearing the dialogue.  There was a bad thumping noise going on in the audio.  I don't know what was up with that.  It was a little annoying.  Sound is Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono for this film and Human Monster, which is better than 1.0 mono at any rate.   The extras included cast/credit/production notes in a nice informative style.  The menu was well laid out for its age, but more extras would have been nice.

 

 

-   Marcus Mazur