Amazon is selling the Fox Horror Classics Collection box set for a very nice $12.84 today, although actually that price is just slightly less than the apparently normal $13.50 price. Still, almost a buck is almost a buck. (You’d have to find something else to get to hit the $25 free shipping, though.)
‘Horror’ Classics might be overstating it, but this set collects three fairly obscure but nifty suspense films by director John Brahm, two of which star Laird Creger, a brilliant but tragically doomed actor who died shortly after these films were made.
The least of the three is the only real horror movie in the set, The Undying Monster, which features a monster but only in the closing seconds of the film. Otherwise it’s a quirky if not really great Old Dark House movie, more fun and interesting than especially good.
Cregar starred in The Lodger, about a couple who rent out their attic to a man they eventually come to suspect may be Jack the Ripper. This is a very good film, although I had the misfortune of seeing the extremely similar remake (The Man in the Attic with Jack Palance) mere months before finally getting to see this. That diminished it for me, but it is still quite good.
Cregar’s last film, Hangover Square, is a just flat out great Hitchcockian suspense film about a concert pianist who is without even realizing it murdering people during psychotic blackouts. This is a *very* good film, and I have no idea why it isn’t better know.
Fox has pulled out the stops on this set, with at least a couple of movies getting commentary tracks from films historians, and each disc getting to what are basically an interconnecting set of documentaries on Brahm and Cregar. Good stuff, and at three films for $13, it might actually cost less to own the set than to rent it from Netflix. I have to say, this is exactly the sort of thing that continues to make DVD such a delight.
