Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

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

TheLittleSongbird This should have been pretty good, seeing that it's based on a timeless play and that it had Maximillian Schell as Hamlet and Ricardo Montalban dubbing Claudius. That it did feature on MST3K and that it was placed #1 on the "Mystery Science Theater 3000: 10 Worst Movies They Riffed" list did make things rather dubious though. Then again the list did have Sampo(aka The Day the Earth Froze), I personally found that a good Soviet-Finnish film that suffered from bad unnecessary American dubbing, so I thought maybe Hamlet isn't as bad as all that. However, other than for the fact that Monster A-Go Go, Manos, Pod People or Space Mutiny should have taken the #1 spot instead on the list this version of Hamlet is as bad as all that. It is structurally pretty faithful to Shakespeare's play and has Ricardo Montalban's menacing and droll voice dubbing that saves it from being unwatchable, but of the Hamlets I've seen this is the worst by a considerable distance(I was mixed on the Mel Gibson version but thought Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's were outstanding). It is a poor-looking film, the starkness could have been effective with the mood and Hamlet's state of mind but actually the lighting and sets looked too amateurish and dreary to give off any real atmosphere. The costumes are a mixture of dull and exaggerated, I saw a plumped-up Oliver Reed comparison in relation to how Claudius was attired and looked and that isn't far off really. The music at best is annoying and whatever movie it is meant to be part of, it sure ain't Hamlet. The story just plods along with no sense of life or tension, the ending usually shocks and moves me but I was left completely cold here while everything is just too slow-moving and perhaps too calculated. I can see why the movie was dubbed, but the actual dialogue came across as stilted and voices didn't fit with the characters, the only real notable exception was Montalban. The acting is not much better either, even Maximillian Schell- so good in Judgment at Nuremberg- gives a very uninspired performance, it is very one-note and mannequin-like with just one real facial expression. Dunja Movar is a total blank as Orphelia, and Hans Caninenberg's Claudius verges on pantomimic. In relation to the MST3K episode, it was fun enough- much more so than the movie- but perhaps because trying to riff Shakespeare is in a very different style to what is usually seen from them it really wasn't one of their best episodes in my opinion. Overall, plodding and dreary, not among the worst movies featured on MST3K but it is really the worst Hamlet you'll ever see and one of the worst Shakespeare adaptations I've come across. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Shannon ** Possible spoilers ahead **I saw this movie only through the aid of Mike and the bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000 a.k.a MST3K. I am a fan of Shakespeare. I've read "Hamlet" a few times. This is the fourth film version of Hamlet I've seen, and it is the worst. The Mel Gibson and Laurence Olivier versions are just breathtakingly wonderful. Branagh's version is slightly tolerable (watch Branagh's "Henry V" instead). This 1960 version just absolutely reeks of badness.Not only is Shakespeare rolling in his grave but Laurence Olivier is probably rolling in his, too, and I don't blame them. There is just one scene with about 10 props and that's it. I loved the riffs from MST3K such as "Hamlet-Man," and "the famous rap artist, the notorious K.I.N.G." Oh, and this movie is very poorly dubbed into English. The filmmakers and directors of this sad, sad, film version of Hamlet are all Laurence Olivier wanna-bees. It was blatanly obvious that they were copying Olivier's film techniques from his version of Shakespeare's tragedy. Here's some advice for future filmmakers (especially those who want to bring Shakespeare to the big screen): NEVER, and I mean NEVER try to copy filmmaking techniques from older, classic films and try to make them breathtaking. It will never work.My hats off to MST3K for making this film tolerable.

Scott Yay!... I think. It's hard to say. It's hard to have an emotion about a movie that has no emotion. This movie is as sterile as a surgeon's scalpel. For a setting, it has a few stone pillars, some stone seats, a couple stone crosses and some stone actors. They have no emotion! The only thing that saves this movie is the fact that it is Hamlet, and Hamlet is a terrificly written piece of literature. The dubbing really wasn't all that bad though. The voices stuck true to the dull, gloomy, dreary, life-sucking atmosphere the movie gave forth. I have seen this version of Hamlet on the fabulous Mystery Science Theater 3000 three times, and each of the three times, I was on the brink of turning off the TV, despite it being MST 3K. Not an uplifting production of a drama that deserves so much better.

Gislef ...this verson doesn't mangle the Bard that badly. It's still a horrible minimalist production, Hamlet's Dutch uncle is inexplicably dubbed by a Spaniard (whether it's Ricardo Montalban or not is subject to debate), and Maximilian Schell overacts like never before. Most of the dialogue makes it through unscathed, and the fact that the MST3K version feels obliged to point out repeatedly that the speeches are long *duh* doesn't strike me as incredibly humorous. Mostly it's just bad acting, though.