The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)

Instant Favorite.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

First, like most people who might take an interest in this film, I am a huge fan of the 1920 original, so I'll take a chance with anything related to it. I was hooked right from the beginning with the opening scene where Francis begins to relate his story to the old man. Listening to the dialog between the two and then seeing the new Jane walk down the path, pushing aside the tree branches, was amazing. At first I felt the acting was overwrought and stilted, but this is actually more true to the original than more restrained acting would be. I have just watched the new Blu-ray of the original and the 2005 remake back to back. I thoroughly enjoyed them both.

Ah, what film could possibly surpass the wonders of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? Not many, I can tell you that. The haunting Conrad Veidt, dazzling Lil Dagover, and just plain creepy Werner Krauss, brought life to this classic horror.It's a shame to see such beauty tarnished by a downright terrible remake.The dialogue seemed to be forced at the best of times, and the actors had no connection with the set, mainly because it wasn't there when they filmed. On top of all that the cast of this abomination lacked in both charm and appeal. They used awkward, jerky movements in a vain attempt to seem 'spooky'.When a film is remade it should at least express the same concept in a different way. This film failed to do that in anyway.

First and foremost i love the original to bits, it was the first silent film i ever watched so you can imagine a feature length movie without dialogue was pretty strange to watch for me then.So what does a version with talking bring? Not really much at all. I was pretty pumped for this, the trailer didn't look all too bad and at first I was excited to hear that they were using the background from the original 35mm print.The backgrounds are composited pretty badly in a lot of scenes, especially my favorite shot of Cesare creeping along the wall, which Is a disaster and he doesn't look like he's touching the wall at all! (They should have built this set!) Doug Jones is a pretty good actor, but he doesn't even touch Veidts performance. He's just simply not scary, the terrifying shot where Cesare opens his eyes for the first time in the original film was severed here.The dialogue is really bad in a lot of places, sure its interesting to see it with dialogue if only for a minute, but comon! Overall id say average, it has a lot of faults but it also is pretty OK in some spots, the new shots are pretty cool. David Lee Fischer obviously didn't love this film enough to leave it THE HELL ALONE!

Great fun to see this old film re-worked. Daamen Krall as Dr. Caligary is excellent. He's creepy, manipulative and sensitive, all at once. By sensitive, I mean you can see his wheels turn. He's a very, very interesting actor, and matched the stylization of this film. Mr. Krall's turn around at the end is also very well executed. The director took on a great task re-working this film, and for the most part, he succeeds. The technical blending of the old and new is nearly imperceptible. However, at times, the dialogue and acting of some of the second leads takes on a very 21st Century twist, which throws off the "feel" of the film. Neil Hopkins is very handsome, and I like to see more of him (in other things), but he was guilty of throwing off this film with his contemporary style.