A classic of German, silent, expressionist horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has spawned a number of bastard children, here we will briefly look at two.
The Cabinet of Caligari is a British horror film scripted by Robert Bloch, who is best known for writing the novel on which the iconic Hitchcock horror film Psycho was based. As Psycho was a tremendous success Bloch understandably wanted to cash in so he wrote this script which is a lose retailing of Caligari but with a female lead, (Glynis Johns, and it turns out that I watched this film on her 91st birthday). The films quite slow so I got restless and looked the movie up online thus spoiling its twist ending, which turns out wasn't much of a twist because its basically the same one as in the original film. In essence with this film Bloch tried to overlay the basic form of Psycho onto the Caligari story and it didn't work very well, even not knowing the twist before hand I suspect I would have found it lame and derivate. So basically this film was a bore. *1/2
That fact that the 2005 remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari even exists is interesting. It's very much a fan film, more of a tribute and a retailing then a 'movie' in its own right, and this is by design. Director David Lee Fisher did something that hadn't been done before, through the use of computers and green screen technology he remade a silent film with the very sets it was first shot on. So technically this film is very intriguing and impressive, though about 10 years on the effects look like something you'd see in a TGWTG production. This film is not silent like the original, there is plenty of dialogue here, but there's nothing great about the acting and the whole thing has kind of an amateurish feel about it, despite its technical achievements and even the novelty of the whole enterprise. **
In short, best to stick with the original.
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