CLASSIC MONSTERS spotlight coll. (dvd) *NEW* and similar items

Brand new factory sealed dvd set is Out Of Print and no longer being manufactured. To collect seperately would be costly. All full frame and in glorious Black White. DRACULA: A legendary film whose reputation has risen almost entirely thanks to its lead performance. In familiar fashion, the tale introduces Renfield (Dwight Frye), a real estate agent on his way to the castle of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi), who welcomes his guest in a most peculiar fashion. Renfield deduces after some time that he should probably escape or lose his life, but by the time he returns home he's out of his mind and winds up in an asylum. However, the Count has purchased Carfax Abbey, a decaying property in London, through which he insinuates himself into British society and begins to prey upon the local denizens. The wily Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) unravels the mystery and realizes the lovely Mina (Helen Chandler) is next on the Count's list; only by resorting to time-worn methods of battling evil can the doctor defeat this evil creature of the night. FRANKENSTEIN: Granddaddy of the Walking Dead/Monster films, so cleverly directed by James Whale (featured in 'God's Monsters') it takes on greater classicality with each viewing. Baron Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his feverish dreams of creating life are realized when his graverobbing hunchback assistant (Dwight Frye) steal's a murderer's brain to go with the patchwork quilt of human fragments; and then his despair when the man he creates becomes a monster. Boris Karloff, as Frankenstein's Monster in the make-up of Jack Pierce, projects a paradoxical mixture of pathos and horror. At first he is the innocent baby, reaching up to grasp the sunlight that filters through the skylight. Then the joyous child, playing at throwing flowers into the lake with a little girl whom he fondly imagines to be another flower to float. And finally, as he finds himself progressively misjudged by the society that created him, the savage killer as whom he has been typecast. Whale's vision was year's ahead of its time, influencing a superb adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel and crisp, Gothic-inspired camerwork by Arthur Edeson. Whale went on to make BRIDE of FRANKENSTEIN: The monster (Boris Karloff) returns, learns to talk, drink, and smoke, and forces his creator (Colin Clive) to piece together a mate in this facinating, humorous horror classic. The film's most incredible performance is from Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius, creator of minature beings. Elsa Lanchester is also pretty amazing as the hissing bride with electric hair (and as Mary Shelley in the prologue). Frankenstein cries, is rejected by his mate, and gets carried Christlike on a cross. Dwight Frye is Karl, Pretorius' murderous servant with John Carradine, and, in there somewhere, Walter Brennan. CREATURE FROM the BLACK LAGOON: Originally shot in 3-D, this is the flat 2-D version. The only Universal monster movie that hasn't been re-made. Richard Denning, accompanied by Richard Carlson and his fiancee Julie Adams, leads an expedition to capture a prehistoric man/fish. They drug the creature, but he breaks loose forcing them to track him through his underwater lairs - some of the best sequences, with sunlight slanting through on the surface whilst below the creature lurks amongst sunken logs and weeds - where Denning is killed and Adams kidnapped. Carlson tries to rescue Adams, and in the final confrontation other members of the expedition shoot the creature and it plunges deep into the lagoon. The creature was played out of the water by Ben Chapman and underwater by swimming champ Ricou Browning, who had to hold his breath for five minutes at a time as there was no room for an aqualung in the tightly fitting costume.