Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The fifth and - to date - last film version of Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 bestseller is handsomely mounted, interestingly cast and far too talky. It worked far better as a silent film, with Brigitte Helm much more convincing than dear Hildegard Knef as the soulless product of artificial insemination. By bestowing such inauspicious parenthood upon his creation Professor ten Brinken (Erich von Stroheim!) explicitly states that it's his desire that a bit of depravity in her genes will create a more exotic bloom than two upstanding citizens could have produced; although real life is constantly demonstrating that Mother Nature can be depended upon to regularly create plenty of young women with more conventional antecedents capable of wreaking just as much havoc among the male sex.Although Ewers was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the New Order and joined the NSDAP in 1931 - and 'Alraune' clearly reflected the eugenics debate that Hitler brought into disrepute - it wasn't filmed during the Nazi era. The director of this postwar version, Arthur Maria Rabenalt, had been an enthusiastic propagandist for the Nazi regime, which makes him an ironic choice for such potentially touchy subject matter.

I saw this on Amazon Prime under the title UNNATURAL: FRUIT OF EVIL. It's a slow-moving little potboiler in which a scientist manages to create an artificial woman with no sense of morality. Inevitably the woman gets loose in the world and causes calamity due to various men falling in love with her. While there are shades of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in the premise and the film explores some intriguingly muddy moral ground, generally it's cheap and listless, never really sparking when it should. The best thing about it is the cast, including Karl Boehm (later of PEEPING TOM infamy), Hildegard Knef, and the barnstorming Erich von Stroheim.

This version of Alraune is largely unremarkable but for another excellent performance by the always-radiant Hildegard Knef. Unambitious cinematography and a slow pace undermine any attempt to build real atmosphere. Most interesting is the film's theme of eugenics and the dangers of science just a few years after the fall of the Third Reich.In some ways, though, the Alraune fable is an inverse of Frankenstein: whereas, in Shelley's tale, science is shown to supersede alchemy, here it is the reverse. Alraune's creator has more in common with Rotwang in the sense that there is a blurring of alchemy and science. It is noteworthy that Brigitte Helm starred as the titular character in the early version of Alraune as well as her more famous role as Maria in Metropolis.This film is recommended to Knef fans and people interested in the Alraune myth. However, as a piece of cinema, it is workmanlike and nothing more.

I have finally managed to catch up with this hard-to-find movie on a budget DVD.Even in 1952, when the movie was first made, it was already an anachronism, full of the misogyny that seemed to characterise German movies from the early Twentieth Century (e.g. The Blue Angel). Typically they featured a beautiful woman who exerts a fatal attraction on all the men around her and then humiliates and destroys them.The femme fatale in this movie is Alraune. She is the result of the artificial insemination of a prostitute by a murderer. This 'unnatural union of tainted blood' is posited as the reason for her selfishness, emotional frigidity and destructiveness. However, at the very end, the movie suddenly flips and holds out the possibility that her soulless predation on men is due to nurture rather than nature. I doubt if this is thematic sophistication on behalf of the film-makers. Probably, it is just indecisiveness.I find this film hard to evaluate, because the print is very poor and there are some baffling artifacts in the DVD transfer that I have never encountered before. More to the point, the movie is only 79 minutes long, as against the 92 minutes quoted on IMDb. I do not know whether this trimming was undertaken when the English language version was prepared, or whether it is a consequence of damage to the print itself. Possibly it is both.This might explain the strange editing. There are some very abrupt plot transitions that suggest significant cuts were made for US distribution but, in addition, the transitions between the remaining scenes are sometimes so sharp that the dubbed dialogue seems to spill over from one scene to the next. This gives the film a disconcerting rhythm. The pacing within scenes is often quite ponderous (I am tempted to say 'Germanic'), but the cutting between them is very sharp. The result is that the movie seems both leaden and breathless at the same time. I would be interested to see the original German language version to see if it has this same paradoxical feel.It is difficult for me to recommend this movie in the form in which I have seen it. It really needs to be viewed in a reasonably good, and reasonably complete, print.Despite all its deficiencies, I found that Alraune did exert a weird sort of fascination, but I recognise that it will probably only appeal to those people who are particularly curious about the oddities that can occasionally be disinterred from the remoter hinterlands of the movie landscape.To the more general movie-goer I would say: "there are better things to do with your time."