Popular reviews

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  Review by Ian West ★★★½ 3

  A wonderfully atmospheric Caligari-esque early Universal jam loaded with shadowy sets wonderfully shot by Karl Freund, disturbing torture/bloodletting scenes, and Bela Lugosi lighting up the screen as only he can—with his sideshow intro speech about evolution resulting in the local townsfolk calling him a heretic. His retort is something along the lines of:

  “Do they still burn people for heresy here?  Do you want to light the match?”.

  That’s a big mood for sure, and his performance here has always stood out to me with its dreamy nuances and eerie insinuations. 

  I came across Murders in the Rue Morgue at a fairly young age via my grandfathers vhs collection—I knew who Lugosi was because of my Dracula obsession but I don’t think I’d seen…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 1

  Murders in the Rue Morgue might not be as strong as The Black Cat or as fun as The Raven, but it’s definitely top form Lugosi doing what he does best and loaded with some damn fine beautiful imagery to boot—can’t wait for the blu to hit!

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★ 10

  "Don't you worry, darling. Look. There's all of our Paris spread out before us."
  "I like to see the little lighted windows twinkling like stars. Wouldn't it be fun to know all that was going on inside those houses?"
  "Perhaps it's just as well that we don't know. Think of what all those walls are hiding: broken hopes and bodies and hearts. Absent dreams, starvation, madness. Crimes of the streets and tragedies of the river. Paris - my city!"

  Spooky Season #35

  This Halloween was a great triumph in my view! I present to you my brilliant costume: Bride of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Please, please, your applause is too much.

  Wanting to close Spooky Season with a…

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★½ 4

  Stylistic approach and mysterious worldbuilding get pushed to the background as tedious characters (except for Lugosi of course) and a dragged out plot are introduced in this forerunner of King Kong. All the same, the gorilla animations were stunning and the rooftop scene a vast pool of ideas and inspirations for the 1933 classic. Worth a watch!

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★½

  Universal horror very loosely based on the Edgar Allen Poe short story - with a few fantastical elements added. The plot here focuses on a mad scientist/carnival sideshow who is killing women by injecting them with ape blood, apparently to prove some sort of kinship between apes and humans. Despite only being an hour long, this one feels quite dragged out and the film doesn't catch fire until about the last ten minutes - mainly because the film is so keen to focus on elements outside of the base plot, which is a shame. The focus is unclear too, as there's no real mystery to the proceedings. Bela Lugosi is obviously the standout of the cast and he provides an…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 2

  Lesser talked about Universal gem opens with impeccable Universal atmos/super imagery and one hell of a Lugosi speech about heresy.

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  Review by sydney ★★★★

  oh to be a beautiful lady that crazed bela lugosi with a unibrow kidnapped, tied up, and injected with ape blood in service of his heathen science experiments

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  Review by DallasFrance ★★★

  Murders in the Rue Morgue features a horny Bella Lugosi shooting assorted damsels up with crazy ape blood. Director Robert Florey and cinematographer Karl Freund combine spooky German Expressionistic lighting with trippy cinematography to juice up a King Kong on Krack tale. Florey adapts Edgar Allan Poe, and Lugosi goes to town on a creepy carnival MC monologue introducing his ape. Fun stuff.

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  Review by Kevin Majestyck 5

  Come for Bela. Stay, for the expressionist cityscape and deranged ape/human hybrid experiments!

  One of Universal’s more shocking pre-Code thrillers, along with Edgar G. Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT. Lugosi’s second horror vehicle for the studio finds him running a carnival exhibit, where he has an ape he’s claiming is the missing link. Pffft, who’s gonna believe a carny?Except Bela’s also a mad scientist, and plans to prove them wrong by kidnapping women and testing their blood for compatibility. They keep dying on him, but a woman attending his most recent show looks to be a better specimen. It doesn’t get more explicit than that, but the film’s implied end-game pushed the limits of taste. Also, our protagonist Dupin seems to…

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  Review by SkaneNoise ★★★½ 5

  Halloween 2023 - 06 out of 31

  1.) Bela Lugosi is alright in this film. He actually looks cool. I guess he plays an off-putting and ugly creepy creep very well.

  2.) I really wish we lit our films like this one. It doesn’t go as hard as German expressionist but it has the care of a craftsperson who wants her hard work to be seen but she doesn’t want to outshine the film she serves, just elevate it.

  3.) It’s a light film. It looks beautiful. It works very well and skips along at a good pace.

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★★

  Yes, it's basically horror as a 'beware the evil immigrant and his, uh, err, talking gorilla', but Bela Lugosi is popping here (in a genuinely weird hairpiece) and Robert Florey directs the heck out of it. (and at almost exactly an hour, how can it go wrong?)

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  Review by Middle-Aged Hate Eternal Enthusiast ★★★★ 8

  What if instead of being a boring, stupid looking piece of shit, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a brisk, entertaining, gorgeously shot and handsomely produced creepy barn burner of a horror film? Robert Florey’s 1932 shocker, Murders in the Rue Morgue is what. Simultaneously elegant and salacious, MITRM is criminally underseen and deserves an enthusiastic reappraisal from horror fans. 

  Lugosi tears the goddamn roof off the joint with his unibrowed howler of a performance. This is the Romanian icon at his most creepily energetic. The rest of the cast is lively and a ton of fun. I love how this film injects humor and carefree youthful reverie into the proceedings to provide even starker contrast with the abominable illegality…