Tag: silent films

Brute Force

Feeling snubbed by his girlfriend at a party, Harry Faulkner finds himself dreaming of the past where a tribe of cave people is attacked by a rival tribe for their women. Numerous fights and occasional encounters with prehistoric monsters ensue. I’m sorry for the shortness of the synopsis, but there really isn’t much plot to …

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The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe has had a hard life. Separated from his sister after their mother passed away, Edgar was taken in by the Allan family. But as he grew, so did his debts and taste for alcohol. Now off on his own with his wife Virginia, Poe struggles with selling his work to help treat …

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I know I usually summarize the film’s plot before diving into my review, but it seems unnecessary this time given how everyone knows the basic story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So much so that the story’s the original twist ending has become the selling point: that Dr. Jekyll transforms Mr. Hyde due to …

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The Ghost of Slumber Mountain

*****

Jack Holmes decides to entertain his visiting nephews with the story of the time he went to Slumber Mountain with a friend of his. But this was no ordinary camping trip. His friend had noted how an abandoned cabin there once belonged to a hermit named Mad Dick, whose ghost is said to haunt it. …

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The Master Mystery

International Patents, Inc. has a pretty good racket going: They buy up the patents from unwary inventors and suppress them. That way, any new inventions that could potentially render products patented by their client corporations obsolete never make it to the market. Naturally, thus makes for a lot of angry inventors and the empty promises …

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The Avenging Conscience

Ever since the day of his birth, the nephew and his uncle have been inseparable. When the boy grows, the two even go into business together. But then the nephew had to go and fall in love. However the uncle fears that his nephew’s spending all his time with his girlfriend will ruin their plans …

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The Headless Horseman

Everyone knows the story of Sleepy Hollow. Schoolteacher Ichabod Crane tries to win the favor of the wealthy Katrina Van Tassel while her jealous suitor Brom Bones schemes to get rid of his rival. Then one fateful night, Crane encounters the legendary Headless Horseman. Sounds like an easy recipe for a silent horror short, right? …

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Haunted Spooks

Haunted Spooks is the classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets other girl and immediately weds her so she can receive her inheritance, boy gets girl despite her scheming relatives dressing up like ghosts to scare them off. Despite some similarities in subject matter this film has with Buster Keaton’s The …

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The Haunted House

****

Not to be confused with the 1913 film of the same name, the film I’m discussing is the less obscure 1921 film by Buster Keaton. In it, Keaton plays a bank teller who finds his usual routine of workplace hijinks and pining for the bank president’s daughter interrupted by a bank robbery. Things go from …

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Free (Legal) Download: Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel

It seems only natural that the Free (Legal) Download series would eventually have to dip into the world of public domain films. Although there have been many instances where copyrighted films were generously made available for free online by the creators, the pool had to diminish at some point. Thankfully, the Library of Congress has …

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