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Rating: 
Summary: Crackles on the soundtrack.
Review: A fan of Lugosi or Karloff? Find it in your budget to pick up this masterpiece. Bryan Senn is a young, inspired, well-read cinephile. His specialty is the 1930's. He's very good. He acknowledges his sources and blends them perfectly into this valuable tome. Interesting pictures and wonderful trivia abound. For example, did you know that, in 1932, Fay Wray was filming "King Kong" during the day, "The Most Dangerous Game" at night, and still going back to Warner Bros. studio for pick-ups on "Dr. X" all at the same time? This remarkable lady is still alive(around age 96). (I met her at a California film festival.) If old horror movies are your bag, are you in luck!
Rating:
Summary: Buy This Book
Review: If your interested in 30's horror this is the one book that you must have. Senn provides full coverage of the genre in the 30's--in depth reviews of all the decade's major films and short reviews of films that are more marginal in importance (mostly mysteries with horror overtones).Golden horrors has the best format of any film book I have ever read. for each major film covered, Senn provides seperate sections on plot summaries, the strengths of the film, its weaknesses, and its prodiuction history. This means you can skip over reading the plots of films you have already seen and get the historical and analytical meat. Senn's taste is informed and almost always on target. He not only tells you what's good or bad about the film but why. There's no vague generalties about ambience or directorial skill--he explains with specifics how the director (or writer or cinematographer) achieved his effects. The production histories are complete and usually very interesting. The book also includes 10 best lists for 30's horror films by Senn and other writers. Finding out Ray Bradbury's top 10 picks will, I think, be of interest to most fans. I can't recommend this book to highly. It's simply the best on the subject and nothing else is even a close second.
Rating:
Summary: Best critique of thirties horror films
Review: Senn's book is simply the best ever done on the classic (and otherwise) horror films of the thirties. It surpasses the coverage of the thirties in such recognized masterpieces as UNIVERSAL HORRORS, and it is hard to see how a book could offer better understanding of the films addressed. If Senn would do a similar job on the forties, he will go down as one of the great authors in the genre. He might anyway.
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