Good concept, poorly executed.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

"Der Golem" is surely one of the best German expressionist silent movies. It may be second only to "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari"; I enjoyed it as much as Murnau's "Faust", and, truth be told, more than "Nosferatu".You probably already know the story: it's a well-known Jewish folk tale about a rabbi who constructs a stone creature (a golem) to protect his fellows from an anti-Semitic government in medieval Prague. The creature impresses the gentiles, but then it turns on its master.These movies aren't really about plot, nor characters. They're about mood, setting, and mise-en-scene. The golem itself is an indelible image; surprisingly it was played by the writer-director himself, who must have been a massive person. You can see the influence on James Whale's classic "Frankenstein". The settings are also sumptuous and fitting.My mind did wander, but not as much as when I watched Swedish silent "Korkarlen", also a horror film based on local myth. I appreciated that the story was easy to follow and interesting.

I originally wanted to watch all the Golem films but after some research it turned out that the first two Golem movies are lost, which is a shame, I guess this is some kind of prequel to the other films, which would explain many things.The Golem (1920) makes use of its amazing sets and great special effects (for the time of course) and delivers a compelling story with its visuals. Silent films have a surreal feeling to them, most of these people are dead and the filmmaking its obviously quite different from what we see today, but they still share the same goal of telling a story. Of course many people can find silent films to be boring, but I believe that film is a visual medium and that filmmakers should show not tell.The myth of the Golem was unknown to me by the time I watched it, at least for the most part, so there's something I got out of it.I find the story to be quite interesting and of course the monster is captivating, every scene with him its just a delight to watch.This was quite an enjoyable film, I wouldn't put it above something like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari or The Phantom of the Opera, but I still think this is worth a watch.

When it comes to silent Expressionistic German horror, there are three movies people point towards: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Nosferatu," and this one. Compare to those two, this can't help but pale. It doesn't feature the surreal sets of "Caligari," nor the heavy shadows of "Nosferatu." This film's main contribution to the Expressionism is its design of the Jewish's ghetto. The buildings rise up into the sky like melted candles.For the majority of its run time, it isn't really a horror film. The Jews of Prague are under prosecution from the emperor because of the same old Anti-Semitic nonsense. In order to protect the ghetto, Rabbi Lew summons Astaroth to provide the word for creating life. The word is written on a piece of paper, shoved in a five-point star, and placed on the clay golem's chest. The inanimate statue comes to life. How does the Rabbi use the Golem to save his people? Um, by having it chop wood and go to the store. Eventually, the Rabbi and his creation are called to the emperor's castle, where the Golem saves every body from a contrived disaster. The town is protected but Lew quickly looses control of the Golem.It's about a half an hour in before the golem is revived. Before that, the movie mostly occupies itself with a love triangle. The Rabbi's daughter, despite having a fiancé, attracts the attention of a foppish Christian knight. This storyline takes up a staggeringly amount of the film. Eventually, the two plots collide. Naturally, this doesn't go well for the lovers. This last act change leads to the film's best moments, such the Golem dropping a body off a roof, dragging the girl around by her pigtails and holding her in his arms in the classic Touch of the Monster pose.The Golem is the most interesting character. His big painted face has a lot of expression. The way he slowly develops emotions is fascinating. The scene of him sniffing a flower and smiling is the first sign and, at the end, he picks up and plays with a little girl. You get the idea that he's just angry that people keep deactivating him. The movie honestly isn't as Anti-Semitic as you'd expect, considering it was made in 1920s Germany. The Jews are depicted as magical wizards, doing things like putting out a fire with a spell, but are never evil or stereotypical.Notoriously, the movie is the third part of a trilogy. It explains the origin of the monster seen in the first film, where the Golem rampaged through then-modern Germany. That movie is lost, though a four-minute clip of it does survive. The second movie, "The Golem and the Dancing Girl," was apparently a comedic parody and is totally lost. "The Golem" isn't as essential as some of the other films I mentioned but is definitely of interest to classic horror fans, if just because the obvious debt "Frankenstein" owed to it.

"The Golem" lays the cinematic groundwork for the 1931 motion picture version of "Frankenstein" . In character design, wardrobe, and interaction with its creator and the world around it, the two monsters do resemble one another. In this case, "The Golem", is a monster created from clay and magic rather than from spare body parts and science, and the monster's creator is a Rabbi. I think I was more shocked to see a Rabbi portrayed as someone who openly dabbled in the black arts and astrology than anything else the film offered. The Rabbi is even shown conjuring up a "god" - Asteroth - and forcing him to produce the life-giving word to bring "The Golem" to life. Any casual reader of the Old Testament will see that the Jews were repeatedly warned against having anything to do with the occult - it was considered blasphemy and worthy of the death penalty under Jewish law. If this is how Germans perceived the practice of the Jewish religion in 1920, fifteen years before the Holocaust began, it might explain a great deal, but nothing about this aspect of the film is mentioned in the extra features of the Kino set in which I saw it, "German Horror Classics".One more interesting parallel to the 1931 film "Frankenstein" is in how the Golem, originally created to protect the Jews but now on a rampage, is destroyed. It is a twist on a similar innocent act in "Frankenstein", one so horrific in its effect that the scene was exorcised from prints of Frankenstein throughout the production code era. I suggest you watch both films and see what I'm talking about.