I should have known from the start that anything that proudly proclaimed it was from the writer/director of Leprechaun would not exactly be a classic of cinema - but I expected it to be at least entertaining.

I can has cheezburger?

A good while back I reviewed a little movie called “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.” I found it tired, derivative, and generally only interesting in regards to how bad it is.

Then something interesting happened. I actually found myself forcing friends to sit through it. And I realized that every time I was making them sit through it, I was sitting through it, too.

About the time I found myself clearing out every copy of it I could find in dollar bins so that I could give copies to my friends, I realized that I had made a mistake on the review.

No, the movie is still bad. Just about everything that I said previously about the quality I still consider to be pretty accurate.

My mistake was in branding the movie a “renter.”

Clearly, this movie is so deliriously bad that it belongs in many, many collections.

And so the court has heard Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla’s appeal and has commuted its sentence to “Keeper.”

I would have enjoyed the movie had these two not been in it.

I couldn’t resist. I knew it would be bad, but it looked so pretty.

The Good: Bombastic scenery matches bombastic musical themes perfectly. The opening sequence sent chills down my spine. Minnie Driver, though lip-syncing her songs, makes an entertaining Carlotta. I forgive her for not singing. Heck, most of the supporting cast is great.

The Bad: The truly wretched new song tacked on the end. Might be nice on its own, but it doesn’t fit thematically with the rest of the tunes.

The Really Ugly: Webber and Schumacher made me cry, in a bad way. Because one of my favorite musicals has been tarnished by the lamentable singing of the two leads. Granted, Emmy Rossum did get a little better as the movie went on, but I couldn’t fathom how her character would become a star with that voice. In the opera world, no less. Gerard Butler screamed his way through the songs attempting to out-Crawford Crawford.

The sad thing is, I think this movie would have been spectacular had some other singers been involved, either on screen (preferable) or at least providing the singing voices.

A vampire member of the Silver Ring Thing? Who would have thunk?

Bad, bad movie. Saying anything else would just be belaboring the point, but just a few observations:

1. If you are going to use a hollow latex mask for the smashing-someone’s-head-in effect, don’t replay it in close up and in slow motion.
2. If your production staff includes someone with the name “Max Wanko,” insist he use a pseudonym.

Peter Lorre argues eloquently for a fair trial.

My friend Blogless Mike watched part of this with me, and he kept remarking on how interesting it was to consider: this is a film industry before Hitchcock, and a Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. (Both Lorre and Lang fled Germany shortly after this film was released). There is so much that serves as background, both in how we understand movies and how we understand current events, that simply had not happened yet.

M is considered an excellent performance by Peter Lorre; it’s also silent film director Fritz Lang’s first “talkie,” so you can see how the transition from title cards to speech was made. One other thing: Lorre’s performance as a pedophile and child-murderer is a dead on Gollum.

None of this, however, was interesting enough to keep Blogless Mike from falling asleep in our most uncomfortable chair. Which is why I’m beginning to think I need an “academic” ranking: fun for nerds.

An old woman curses a disrespectful passerby.

Häxan, the 1922 silent documentary on witchcraft and witch persecution by Benjamin Christensen, was restored and released as a Criterion Collection DVD. It’s an interesting film on many academic levels, both from a film history perspective and from a sociological history perspective. Now, some eighty-five years after its initial release, we probably learn more about the sensibilities and attitudes of 1922 from this film than we do about witchcraft or the Spanish Inquisition.

When I originally reviewed From Dusk Till Dawn, I mentioned that it had spawned two sequels. Because I firmly believe that man was made to suffer, I recently decided that it was time to force myself to sit down and watch them to see if there was any way they could be worse than the original.