Purely Joyful Movie!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Crappy film

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Watching this late at night, I kept dozing off and then rewinding to see what I'd missed. This woman who is sometimes seen as a vampire, has incredible power over men. She can get them to do what she wants, even to the point of killing themselves or others. She was kidnapped and sold into slavery and has this rage and craziness in her eyes. Men can't resist her and fall into her traps. We don't know what her motives are other than to seek revenge on those who put her in this position. There is a lot of overacting (a hallmark of the silent cinema anyway) and very little plot. Robert Wiene ("The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary") is just getting started and some of the cinematography is interesting. But over all, it just doesn't do much to captivate the viewer.

Regardless of this silent-era picture now being almost 100 years old, it's still not worth more than a 2-star rating, in my books.Believe me, this German export was pretty bloody awful (even when I took into account it being a product of cinema's by-gone days).For one thing - Had the leading actress, Fern Andra (who played the title character, Genuine) been even marginally attractive, then, yes, that would've certainly helped this nonsensical film at least rise above its sub-par mediocrity.But this actress (with her frizzy hair and bug eyes) had to be one of the absolute, most dog-ugly dames imaginable, regardless of the era of fashion that she represented.It's especially when you take into consideration that the Genuine character was supposed to be an irresistible seductress (aka. vamp-ire), where all the men were literally falling head-over-heels in love with her (and actually quite willing to commit murder, if she so commanded) that her decidedly cheap and somewhat creepy looks rendered her (along with the rest of the movie) as being repulsive rather than attractive.Besides not being even slightly entertaining (even from a nostalgic point of view), I found this moldie-oldie, with its ridiculously exaggerated acting, to be nothing but a stale, old joke told in very bad taste.Thank goodness this film only had a running time of just 43 minutes.

I caught this years back at the Paris Cinematheque hoping to find something of interest from the director of Caligari. It was a disappointment in just about every way for me. First, the film at its original length seemed to go on forever. The elements were there, granted, but they didn't combine as they did in the previous film. I had the feeling of watching a film that was going through all the necessary steps but missing all the points. It was more an exercise in style which blindly followed all the guidelines but missed going anywhere. On the other hand, and perhaps unfairly to subsequent films, "Caligari" was a one-of-a-kinder that left no space for a sequel. Period.Curtis Stotlar

I've just viewed the Image DVD of CALIGARI, with commentary by Mike Budd. This DVD also includes excerpts from GENUINE. While the snippets included are pretty strange and disconnected, they show a major similarity between the two films -- that is, the "frame" structure of the story. CALIGARI's frame is that it is a story told by a madman. In GENUINE, it appears that the story is a "dream" experienced by a young man who has fallen asleep reading his favorite novel. What I saw of GENUINE makes it seem the young man's favorite author was Sacher-Masoch. See also how Genuine messes up the young man's hair in a rush of passion -- shades of John Barrymore's transition scenes from DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE?