Review – London After Dark

Half an E for effort to Turner Classic Movies. It isn’t every channel that will show a movie whose only surviving print was destroyed in a fire in the 50s. What we’ve got here, then, looks like an extended PowerPoint presentation cobbled together from a substantial supply of production stills. It’s fun to see some of Lon Chaney’s makeup, and the show gives some idea of how the plot was structured. However, there’s almost no sense at all of Todd Browning’s directing skill. As wonderful as it would have been to see Browning and Chaney paired up on the silver screen, this is a poor substitute for a real movie. It doesn’t help that the rich-guy-turned-vampire-sucking-English-blood story is more than a little evocative of another Browning production with a classic horror movie star produced just a few years later. The folks who threw this together had their hearts in the right place, and they did a good job with what they had to work with. Sadly, it just wasn’t enough. Mildly amusing