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Absolutely Fantastic

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Unheimliche Geschichten is an anthology of five short "Uncanny Stories" read by Death, the Devil and the Harlot who step out of three life sized paintings in an old bookstore after closing. Though really none of these tales are very frightening, Conrad Veidt's menacing looks and dramatic performances in each, undoubtedly helped him secure the role of Caesar in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920). Oswald's use of the anthology format may also be the earliest in the history of the horror genre of cinema.

"Richard Oswald's "Eerie Tales" debuted with a length of 2318 metres, July 16, 1920, after a premiere on November 6, 1919. The original negative is considered lost. This restoration is from Cinematheque Francaise. The film currently has a length of 2230 metres."Paintings of Death, the devil, and a prostitute come to life in a bookstore, after hours, and read each other five tales of horror, to amuse themselves, in this early anthology film.Each of the three leads take on different roles in each of the five stories, giving each actor an opportunity to show a wide range, and the film has a good look to it, plus I've always had a certain affinity for anthology horrors, but the problem with this is that it's not scary. I was hoping for a bit more fright for my 31 Days of Halloween horror. Die Erscheinung, by Anselma Heine, and Poe's Die Schwarze Katze were the best of the segments, while the rest were overly dramatic.

"Unheimliche Geschichten" (and I could list a dozen alternate titles here, in English and German) is a German black-and-white silent film that run slightly over 2 hours in the original, but slightly under 100 minutes in the DVD version. Actually, this is not really a movie, but rather a collection of 5 short stories told to each other by creepy horror creatures. Anita Berber, Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel play all the major characters in here and, in my opinion, the only one who makes it somewhat worth watching is Veidt. He was still pretty young here just like the other two, so this was a bit of a film by the new generation of actors. But this Richard Oswald movie was never a rewarding watch. It was not emotional, not engaging, not dramatically relevant and certainly not scary. There are many better German silent horrors from around that time. I do not recommend watching this one. Thumbs down, it dragged on several occasions. And the intertitles as poems were simply bad. They should have been normal text and a lot more frequent.

Any devotee of vintage horror films will want to see Conrad Veidt in an anthology of fantastic tales, but will be disappointed if he expects another "Waxworks" or "Destiny." This looks as if it had been tossed together rather casually, as an actors' lark, and the actors, especially Veidt, mug exuberantly. The five tales, sketchily told, are "The Black Cat," "The Suicide Club," stories of hauntings real and fake, and the old anecdote about the man whose wife disappears from an inn where everyone swears she was never there. These are read by three figures who have stepped out of paintings in an antiquarian bookshop and driven off the (exceedingly odd) owner. The three appear in all the stories, usually with the two men as rivals for the woman. The tone of the framing story and one of the tales from the books is comic, and that of the others deliberately exaggerated. The prevailing weirdness tends to neutralize the scary moments, and so does the Wagnerian music with which the version distributed by LS Video has been unwisely scored. This version doesn't look bad compared to some old films on video (one can clearly make out the actors' faces), but the condition of the print makes it impossible to tell how the film looked originally. It's no classic, but an entertaining view of a young Veidt running the gamut of extreme emoting.