Orlok – The Vampire 3-D (Quality Cheese Productions/MVD DVD) + Undead: The Vampire Collection (Mill
Creek DVD Set)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D 3-D
Film: D Film Set: C
3-D is
only good when it is not a gimmick and while the new wave of it in theaters
(the digital wave, we’ll say) will have a honeymoon period until 2011, some
productions are going to be so bad, it will remind us how the last three waves
were killed off in the first place. With
this wave happening for the first time in the home video era, you will get
cynical releases like Orlok – The
Vampire 3-D, which takes Murnau’s classic Nosferatu (1922) and shreds it beyond belief.
You
essentially have a group of hacks take the classic, and it down, reedit it, add
title cards in the silent movie mode that make it look more like the 1960s Batman series than anything remotely
resembling a vampire film and come up with the worst possible “new dialogue”
and you get a total mess. Worst of all,
it is identified as an “F.W. Murnau Production” though he also directed
it. Some other hack (who will remain
nameless) takes Producer and Director credits and does not even have a Germanic
name.
If you
have to see the film, endless copies are out there, yet none have been
satisfactory to me (and I wonder about the tinted version), so you can see a
scratched up version on Mill Creek’s new Undead:
The Vampire Collection which may not be perfect or 3-D (the film never was,
of course), but it is more authentic and they even credit Murnau for directing!
About the
same price as the Orlok release, you
get 19 more features including: Atom Age
Vampire (1960), The Bat (1926), The Bat (1959), Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (1969), The Bloody Vampire (1962), Count
Dracula & His Vampire Bride (1974), Crypt Of The Living Dead (1973), The Devil Bat (1941), Horrible
Sexy Vampire (1970), Horror Express
(1972), The Last Man On Earth (1960,
reviewed elsewhere on this site), Nightmare
Castle (1965), Prime Evil
(1988), Terror Creature From The Grave
(1965), The Vampire Bat (1933), Vampire Happening (1971), Vampire’s Night Orgy (1973), The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman
(1971) and The Witches Mountain
(1972) which are all public domain and often forgotten. Though few are great, they are all
interesting in their own way and just about all are more ambitious than most
B-movies we are getting in the genre now.
Some have
key stars (Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Barbara Steele, Vincent Price, Bela
Lugosi, Paul Naschy) and others have key technicians and directors from the
genre, so it is a good catch up set if nothing else. Last
Man On Earth is the original, official version of I Am Legend and influenced the look of Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, both also
reviewed elsewhere on this site.
The 1.33
X 1 image on the 3-D DVD is really 2-D 99% of the time and pointless, while the
various prints on the Undead set are
rough and worn. Some have good image
quality, but we also get our share of print damage, softness, color fading, the
wrong aspect ratio and other issues as expected for such a cheap
compilation. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo on Orlok is harsh, annoying
and poorly recorded, while the monophonic sound on the 20 films on the Undead set may show their age, but are
not manipulated in dumb ways. Be careful
of volume levels and volume switching in all cases. Extras include a pointless introduction by
Lloyd Kaufman and 2 pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, but with nothing to really
see, they are useless.
For more
on the real Nosferatu, try this
link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/essay/222/Vampirism,+Sexuality+&+Death+-+The
- Nicholas Sheffo
