Gothic (1986)

Ken Russell’s Gothic, released in 1986, is based on the famous real-life events of a three-day period in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati Near lake Geneva when Lord Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and his mistress (and soon-to-be bride) Mary Godwin and Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori amused themselves by reading ghost stories and decided, as a contest, that each of them would write a ghost story. As a result the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, two of the most influential literary works in history.

With Frankenstein Mary Shelly invented science fiction (in this case with major gothic overtones) and with The Vampyre Polidori invented modern vampire fiction.

It was subject matter that was always going to appeal to Ken Russell. He was fascinated by artistic genius and explored the theme in countless movies. Russell was not interested in worshipful biopics. He was more interested in things like genius as madness, genius thwarted (Savage Messiah), genius betrayed (The Music Lovers) and genius as a self-destructive force (Isadora, Mahler, Dante’s Inferno).

It’s obvious from the start that Russell is going to great lengths to avoid the look and feel of BBC-TV costume dramas and the Merchant-Ivory movies and that he did not want cast members who looked like they belonged in any of those productions. Russell wanted something much wilder and crazier and he wasn’t worried about getting all the period details correct. Claire Clairmont in this movie looks like she’s on the way to a 1980s nightclub.

Percy Shelley is too often imagined as a sensitive, gentle, pallid aesthete. In this movie he’s a complete nutter and much more like the real Shelley - an unstable overgrown selfish spoilt child.

Byron was the first rock star. He lived the rock star lifestyle. Sex, drugs and Romantic poetry.

Wth five neurotic unstable drug-addled individuals stuck indoors with wild storms raging outside, reading too many ghost stories and doing too many drugs they quickly become even crazier than they were to begin with. Their personal demons are soon getting the better of them.

It doesn’t help that Byron is growing bored with Claire. Or that Percy Shelley had had an affair with Claire. There’s a whole web of interlocking jealousies and obsessions.

Claire is getting seriously weird and Shelley is becoming unhinged. They’re both experiencing hallucinations. Pretty soon they’re all experiencing hallucinations.

This movie is Ken Russell excess at its most excessive. Lots of wild off-kilter camera angles and disturbing lighting and then there are the automatons.

This is Ken Russell remorselessly picking apart the dark side of genius, and the Byron-Shelley circle was ideal material. Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were advocates of anarchism, feminism and free love which had predictably catastrophic effects on Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and on Percy Shelley. These were particularly dangerous ideas for a mind as feeble as Shelley’s. Percy Shelley’s embrace of these doctrines drove his first wife to suicide.

Not only can creative geniuses be profoundly unpleasant people, they can also be profoundly stupid.

The movie is certainly a horror movie. Five awful people descend further and further into a drug-fuelled gothic fiction nightmare world of madness and horror, a nightmare world they have themselves created. They can no longer distinguish between nightmare and reality.

Do creative geniuses need to be mad? Probably not, but there’s no question that many creative geniuses have been trainwrecks as human beings and they’re the geniuses Ken Russell was interested in. The film suggests that it was three days of deranged but talented people tearing themselves apart in an orgy of insanity and excess that gave the world two unquestioned masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Maybe it was worth it from the world’s point of view.

Russell is trying to tie in the crazy goings-on at the Villa with the creation of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. These two works are gradually taking shape in the minds of Mary and Polidori. The five think they’re created a monster that’s haunting them but in fact they’re assisting in the birth of two literary masterpieces (and there is plenty of procreation and child-birth symbolism).

The performances could not be described as good in a conventional sense but they’re the crazed off-the-wall performances that Ken Russell wanted.

Gothic may not quite be top-tier Ken Russell but it deserves a much better reputation. Fascinating and highly recommended.

I have the German Blu-Ray which provides an excellent transfer and offers both English and German language options.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

You’re making a Frankenstein movie in 1971 but you want to add something different, to make your film look less like a rip-off of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies. So what do you do? You give Baron Frankenstein a beautiful sexy daughter who is also a mad scientist. And you make her the focus of the story. That’s the basis for Lady Frankenstein.

Of course you’ll need the right actress. How about Rosalba Neri? She’s sexy, glamorous, classy, she can act and she has the ability to be equally convincing as a heroine or a villainess. She turned out to be an inspired choice.

Joseph Cotten gets top billing but he actually has only a supporting role. This is totally a star vehicle for Rosalba Neri. She has to carry the film. And she does so with ease.

The setting is supposed to be England but it looks more like the Central Europe of Hammer’s gothic horror movies. In fact the whole visual style of this movie owes quite a lot to Hammer.

Lady Frankenstein adds some sleaze and some hints of sexual perversity. That was very much the trend in European horror at the time and Hammer were moving, a bit tentatively, in that direction. Lady Frankenstein goes a bit further than Hammer would dare to go.

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr Charles Marshall (Paul Muller) are on the verge of the final successful breakthrough in their attempts to create a living man out of dead tissue.

The problem is that the brain they are using comes from a hanged murderer and this brain has a few malfunctions. They create a man-monster and bring him to life but they can’t control him and Baron Frankenstein pays the price for his error of judgment.

In the 1931 Frankenstein there is of course a famous scene involving the monster, a child and a pond. In Lady Frankenstein this scene is a little different - the monster hurls a naked young woman into a lake, having surprised her having sex on the lakeshore with her young man. This is the monster’s first killing but there will be plenty more.

Baron Frankenstein’s daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) vows to continue her father’s work, which Dr Marshall’s assistance. This is where the movie gets interesting. Tania Frankenstein is not a mere simplistic evil mad scientist. She has a number of simultaneous motivations. Ambition is one motivation but she is also driven by both lust and love. Tania has a woman’s emotional needs and a woman’s physical needs. Dr Marshall can satisfy the former and she is attracted by his mind but his weedy middle-ged body does not set her pulses racing. Maybe Tommy, her servant, can satisfy her sexual needs? He has a strong masculine body. Unfortunately he is a halfwit. Tania needs a man with both an exciting mind and an exciting body. If only the dumb-as-a-rock but hunky Tommy had Dr Marshall’s brain!

It’s always difficult to judge acting performances when they’re dubbed, but Rosalba Neri smoulders when she needs to smoulder and she’s convincingly depraved. Joseph Cotten is very good - he did quite a few exploitation movies in Italy around this time but in this instance at least he is not just phoning it in.

Mel Welles directs. He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a director but here he is at least competent. It’s visually reasonably impressive with a fairly cool mad scientist’s laboratory (which was re-used in several other movies) and manages not to look cheap.

The big problem is the very lame monster. It’s not a fatal flaw because the focus is very much on Tania Frankenstein and her romantic and erotic entanglements that lead her to become a fully-fledged evil mad scientist. But the monster is seriously lame.

Lady Frankenstein doesn’t push things very far on the gore front. There is however a fair bit of nudity and sex. The movie’s selling point was clearly going to be the sexy lady mad scientist.

The movie was shot in Italy and partly financed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. The version released in the States was cut, apparently not so much to remove sex and violence as to get the running time down to the length Corman wanted. With the cut scenes restored the plot makes a lot more sense and the motivations of the characters are a lot clearer.

Lady Frankenstein isn’t one of the gothic horror greats but it offers plenty of enjoyment. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Volume 1 Blu-Ray boxed set and it gets a lovely transfer. There’s an audio commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman which, as you would expect from those two, is both illuminating and entertaining. And there’s a second audio commentary and other extras as well.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), Blu-Ray review

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, released in 1969, is the fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies.

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) has had to leave Bohemia after certain unfortunate events. He had been in the process of obtaining important scientific supplies. Just the usual things. Human heads, that sort of stuff. He disturbed a burglar. The burglar made his escape and went to the police with a horrifying story of severed heads and dead bodies in the cellar of Frankenstein’s house. Frankenstein decides it’s time to pack his bags.

Frankenstein now has a stroke of luck. He discovers that a young doctor named Karl Holst (Simon Ward) has been stealing and selling drugs from the mental hospital at which he is employed. This knowledge allows Frankenstein to blackmail Dr Holst into becoming his unwilling assistant. Dr Holst’s fiancée Anna (Veronica Carlson) is drawn into his plans as well.

One of the patients at the mental hospital is a Dr Frederick Brandt. Brandt had been working in the same field as Frankenstein - human brain transplants. The asylum’s chief doctor, Dr Richter (Freddie Jones), is convinced that Brandt is now hopelessly and incurably insane. But Brandt has expertise that Frankenstein needs so he hatches a scheme to snatch Dr Brandt from the asylum.

One thing about Frankenstein is that he is not easily dismayed. When he discovers that Dr Brandt has at most a couple of days to live he simply changes his plans a little. He’ll just transplant Dr Brandt’s brain into a fresh body. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. Frankenstein’s ruthless manipulation of other people will have consequences for him, he cannot entirely trust either Karl or Anna, he has the police after him and even the best-laid plans of evil geniuses don’t always go smoothly.

This is a Frankenstein movie with a monster who isn’t very monstrous and is very sympathetic. He’s a man not a monster, but his brain is in another man’s body. Having a relatively non-monstrous monster was taking a risk but it pays off handsomely giving the climax a real emotional punch. And it actually makes the film much more horrific and genuinely tragic.

Bert Batt wrote the screenplay, from a story by Batt and producer Anthony Nelson Keys. It’s a script that doesn’t just recycle the themes of the earlier Frankenstein films but adds some new touches and some new emphases.

This is the Hammer A team in action, with Terence Fisher directing, Arthur Grant doing the cinematography, Bernard Robinson handling the production design and James Bernard composing the score. And they do some of the best work they ever did for Hammer. There is nothing about this film that seems cheap or shoddy. Hammer always worked under tight budgetary constraints but at its best the studio could turn out very high quality productions and this movie is prime Hammer horror.

Peter Cushing is in fine form. He’s all icy determination and supreme arrogance. Baron Frankenstein is so convinced of his own genius that he genuinely believes that the ordinary rules of morality do not apply to him. He kills without mercy and casually destroys lives. He has become more of a monster than any of the monsters he has created. Cushing really is chilling. All of his performances as Frankenstein are slightly different and this may well be his best. And it does make sense that after devoting so much of his life to the more bizarre aspects of science the Baron has finally lost the last vestiges of his humanity.

Freddie Jones could be engagingly hammy but when he put his mind to it he was a fine actor as he proves in his later emotionally wrenching scenes in this film. The characters played by Simon Ward and Veronica Carlson at least have some depth. They know they’re serving an evil genius but they can’t see a way out. Thorley Walters is amusing as Inspector Frisch although these brief moments of humour seem slightly out of place in what is actually a very grim and very serious horror film. And it has to be said that, in keeping with the film’s overall tone, the humour is subdued.

There is of course the notorious scene in which Frankenstein rapes Anna. This scene was a late addition and was apparently included over the strong objections of Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson and Terence Fisher. It does seem a bit unnecessary and it feels out of place, although on the plus side it does have the effect of forcing on the audience the realisation that Frankenstein really has become a monster with no redeeming qualities.

There’s not much actual onscreen gore but there’s a great deal of implied gruesomeness. These were the days when horror movies still relied on the horrific nature of the ideas presented rather than just throwing buckets of blood at the viewer. This is also a movie that doesn’t just rely on horror.

There are a couple of excellent suspense moments, especially the police search of the boarding house in which Frankenstein’s laboratory is concealed. Terence Fisher started his directing career making slightly noirish crime thrillers and he demonstrates that he can be cinematically compelling without any need for blood or gore.

The Warner Home Video Blu-Ray offers a really lovely transfer. The lack of extras is perhaps a bit disappointing but the quality of the transfer makes up for it.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is overall the most satisfying of all the Hammer Frankenstein movies In fact it’s one of the most satisfying of all Hammer’s horror movies). It has a real edge to it. There’s no high camp here. The mood is relentlessly grim and the shocks really do shock. Very highly recommended.

The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

The Evil of Frankenstein, released in 1964, was the third film in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle. It’s an interesting variation on the formula.

Once again the hostility of the locals to his experiments has forced Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing of course) and his assistant Hans (Sandor Elès) to flee. He decides to return to Karlstadt. Although he was banished from the town a decade earlier, he still has substantial assets there, assets which he needs to convert into cash to fund his scientific work. Unfortunately on his arrival he finds that his chateau has been looted and left in ruins.

By a strange stroke of fate, due to an encounter with a deaf-mute beggar girl (played by Katy Wild), he discovers the frozen body of the creature he had created there ten years earlier, and this inspires him to attempt to revive the monster.

Unfortunately it proves difficult to restore the creature to consciousness, until Frankenstein hits on the idea of using a travelling hypnotist (by chance it happens to be carnival time in Karlstadt) to re-awaken the creature’s brain. The hypnotist, Professor Zoltán (Peter Woodthorpe), turns out to be an evil hypnotist who plan to use his hold over Frankenstein’s creation in order to gain wealth and exact revenge on his own enemies.

The greatest strength of Hammer’s Frankenstein films is the character of Baron Frankenstein himself, an uneasy mix of idealism and arrogance, genius and insanity. Peter Cushing (giving some of his best ever performances in this role) was able to tease out the various strands in the baron’s make-up with considerable subtlety and sensitivity. The Evil of Frankenstein gives us some tantalising hint of the obsessed scientist’s character flaws and complexities, hints which perhaps should have been more fully developed.

Despite the title The Evil of Frankenstein shows us a relatively sympathetic Baron Frankenstein. The evil in this movie comes more from others who misuse his creation than from the baron himself. Cushing managed to make each of his performances as Frankenstein slightly different. This time around he’s certainly obsessive but his chief failure is his unwillingness to believe that his scientific work, pursued for what he conceives to be noble purposes, can have dangerous and disastrous results. He is a man embittered by what he sees as the refusal of the world to allow him to continue his research in peace, and further embittered when he realises too late that Professor Zoltán is not only using him but endangering his work. Cushing is able to convince us that Frankenstein genuinely believes himself to be a fundamentally benign misunderstood genius.

This movie also features a very sympathetic monster. Like his creator he is used for evil purposes by the unscrupulous Zoltán. There are some touching scenes between the monster and the deaf-mute beggar girl, who both seem to recognise each other instinctively as outcasts.

Cushing as always dominates but he gets good support from the other players with Peter Woodthorpe making an interesting villain, a man who is evil because he is weak and selfish and self-centred rather than actively pursuing evil.

The Frankenstein cycle presented Hammer with a major creative challenge. By its very nature it was a rather restrictive formula. Each movie had to have Baron Frankenstein creating (or in this case) recreating another monster who would eventually run amok and leave the baron’s work in ruins. It’s to the studio’s credit that they managed to keep adding enough variations to that basic formula to keep it interesting. In this case screenwriter Anthony Hinds came up with a rather clever idea, shifting the focus of evil onto another character (Professor Zoltán) thereby casting both Frankenstein and his monster as victims.

The movie has other strengths as well. Director Freddie Francis (who won two Academy Awards as a cinematographer) had a particular flair for visuals, and The Evil of Frankenstein looks quite wonderful. The baron’s laboratory is magnificent. The visual strengths are sufficient in themselves to maintain the viewer’s interest even when the plot falters.

Given that it’s the look of this movie that is its strong suit it’s fortunate that the DVD included in Universal’s superb eight-movie Hammer boxed set is absolutely stunning. The picture is crystal clear, the colours are rich and vibrant. It’s a feast for the eyes. 

The Evil of Frankenstein has always been unfavourably compared to the Terence Fisher-directed Frankenstein movies. While it lacks the subtlety and moral force of Fisher’s movies it’s a better movie than its reputation would suggest and it looks fabulous. Well worth a look.

Mystery and Imagination - Frankenstein

Mystery and Imagination was a gothic horror anthology series broadcast on British television from 1966 to 1970. Each episode was based on a classic work of gothic fiction. Sadly only eight of the original twenty-four episodes survive and these have now been released on DVD by Network DVD. One of the more interesting of the surviving episodes is the feature-length adaptation of Frankenstein.

The early episodes were made by ABC. After their forced merger with Rediffusion the later seasons, with some major format changes, came out under the Thames TV banner. Frankenstein, first broadcast in 1968,  belongs to this later period.

The intention was clearly to produce an adaptation of the novel that was closer to both the letter and the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel. In this it succeeds reasonably well. This version makes use of one clever trick that had surprisingly not been tried in previous screen versions. I won’t reveal the trick as it does constitute a minor spoiler.

Ian Holm was always a fairly reliable actor and he does well in the title role. The supporting cast is solid with Richard Vernon being memorable as a crusty old professor of anatomy.

Obviously the producers didn’t have the kind of budget to play with that most film versions of the story have had but they still do a fine job of evoking the gothic atmosphere and the crucial bringing-the-monster-to-life scene works well. Frankenstein’s laboratory is less spectacular than in most Frankenstein movies but still looks reasonably impressive.

This TV version puts more emphasis on Dr Frankenstein’s conscious efforts to emulate a God he professes not to believe in, and in this respect is probably closer to Mary Shelley’s intentions than most movie versions. Mary Shelley’s father was a socialist agitator, her mother was an nearly feminist and her husband a strident and aggressive atheist. In spite of all this, or more probably because of these things, Mary Shelley was rather sceptical of our ability to dispense with God.

This Frankenstein focuses to a large extent on Dr Frankenstein’s responsibility towards his creature, and the psychological horror of his guilt over his creation. This is in general a much more psychological approach than has been taken in any film version.

Although Ian Holm was nearly forty when the program was made his Dr Frankenstein seems in many ways to be a very young man. His arrogance comes across as being partly at least the arrogance of youth, which makes his actions perhaps slightly more forgivable.

On the downside this TV version is rather talky, which is perhaps inevitable in a TV production that can’t rely as heavily on visual images as a movie would. Ian Holm at times gives the impression that he’s giving a stage performance.

An interesting Frankenstein adaptation and worth a look.

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974)

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (Santo y Blue Demon contra el doctor Frankenstein) delivers exactly what it promises - it pits the Man in the Silver Mask against Dr Frankenstein himself.

This movie, released in 1974, is another installment in the long-running series of Mexican movies (in fact there were more than fifty of them) starring professional wrestler and part-time crimefighter and superhero Santo.

Young women are disappearing in disturbingly large numbers. That would be terrifying enough, but the young women are then reappearing as zombies! Even worse, killer zombies. It soon becomes clear that someone out there is performing brain transplants. Unsuccessful brain transplants. The dead victims are then re-animated by means of a remote-control device implanted in their bodies.

Who could be doing such horrific things? Surely it could not be Dr Frankenstein - he must be long dead.

But Dr Frankenstein is not dead at all - he is very much alive and active, even if he is 113 years old! And he is the diabolical figure behind these horrendous brain experiments.

Dr Frankenstein has also devised a way of reversing the ageing process and he uses this promise to recruit two prominent brain surgeons to serve as his assistants. And now Dr Frankenstein has a new victim in mind - Santo! His one successful brain transplant patient is Golem, a huge black man. Golem has enormous strength, but he lacks skill and agility. If he had Santo’s gifts in those areas he would be truly formidable, and nothing could prevent Dr Frankenstein from achieving his aim of unlimited power.

Dr Frankenstein needs is a way of capturing Santo alive and undamaged, and the only way to do that is to make Santo come to him. And that can be achieved quite easily - all he needs to do is to kidnap Santo’s girlfriend Alicia Robles.

What Dr Frankenstein hadn’t counted on was that Santo would figure out what he was up to, and that Santo would not be fighting this battle alone - his friend and wrestling partner Blue Demon will prove to be a valuable ally.

There are the usual wrestling sequences but this time wrestling forms an integral part of the plot - Santo will be matched against Golem, with both Alicia’s life and the safety of humanity being the stakes.

Jorge Russek as Dr Frankenstein makes a fairly effective villain while Golem is certainly a very effective heavy. There’s nothing to say about Santo’s acting - if you’ve seen one Santo movie you know what to expect, and Santo fans don’t expect their hero to be a great actor. He is Santo, he is a legend, and that’s more than enough.

The Santo movies were all fairly low-budget affairs. Dr Frankenstein’s secret laboratory would have cost very little but it looks quite effective. There’s plenty of action, and plenty of thrills. This is a superhero movie Mexican style and it’s a great deal more fun than most such movies.

This is one of the most highly regarded of the Santo movies. The combination of Santo with one of the most famous of all fictional villains has an obvious appeal. It’s all highly entertaining and is a must for fans of the Man in the Silver Mask.

Rise Above’s DVD release offers the original Spanish soundtrack with English subtitles and it’s a decent if not spectacular transfer.

Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

Frankenstein Created Woman, released in 1967, was the fourth entry in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, and marks Terence Fisher’s return to the Frankenstein movies (the third film had been directed by Freddie Francis). It’s also one of the best of their Frankenstein films.

This one really hits the ground running. We start with a rather scene of the guillotining of a laughing murderer, witnessed by his young son Hans. Then we switch to a superbly atmospheric scene in which Baron Frankenstein himself is returned from the dead by his two assistants, one of whom is the boy who had watched his father’s execution. The other is the dotty but devoted Dr Hertz (Thorley Walters).

Baron Frankenstein’s latest experiments are concerned with the soul. He regards the conquest of physical death, the death of the body, as being almost too easy. But what of the soul? When does it leave the body, and can it be captured? What he needs are some more experimental subjects, people only just dead so that their souls are likely to be easier to capture. He will soon get the subjects he wants.

He has sent Hans off to the local inn to buy some champagne. There we are introduced to three degenerate upper-class ruffians, Anton, Karl and Johann. They are amusing themselves by tormenting the innkeeper’s daughter Christina (Susan Denberg). She has been disfigured and crippled in an accident and is an easy target for their cruel games, except that Hans happens to be in love with her and in the fight that subsequently breaks out one of Christina’s tormentors is left with a bloody nose. The local constabulary are called and we find that Hans is regarded with some suspicion - as the son of a murderer he is considered to be potentially violent by definition plus he works for Baron Frankenstein, a man universally regarded with fear and dislike.

This assumption of inherited violence will have unfortunate consequences for young Hans. It will lead him to the guillotine as well, and indirectly lead to poor Christina’s death. But the story is not over yet for either of them. Baron Frankenstein gains possession of Christina’s body and Hans’ soul, and restores Christina to life, but with Hans’ soul as well as her own in her body. Her body is no considerably better than new - the disfigured broken girl is now a stunning young woman. But Hans wants revenge.

This is the kind of movie that always interested Terence Fisher, offering the opportunity to examine issues of good and evil, guilt and punishment, the soul vs the body. It’s also the sort of movie that Peter Cushing could really get his teeth into.

This is Peter Cushing at his best. His Baron Frankenstein isn’t quite evil but he is in his own way monstrous. He’s monstrous because he has convinced himself that his genius gives him the right to disregard society’s rules, but he is still troubled by twinges of conscience. The mad scientist whose arrogance and determination to pursue knowledge at any cost leads him to commit crimes against humanity is of course a cliché, but it’s not a cliché the way Cushing plays it. In most cases such characters end up as comic-book villains, but Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein is much more subtle. And he’s aware of his own ethical dilemmas.

Susan Denberg plays Christina, both the crippled ugly duckling Christina and the beautiful Christina created by Frankestein. Her qualification for the role was that she’d been Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for August 1966. But she’s actually quite good in what is a reasonably demanding dual role. Her acting career went nowhere but this was apparently due more to personal problems than to a lack of talent.

Thorley Walters gets more screen time than usual. It’s the kind of role he could play in his sleep but he’s delightful as always.

Robert Morris as Hans is pretty good as well - the casting for this movie really was very successful.

This is Hammer’s A team in action - Terence Fisher directing, Anthony Hinds writing the script, Bernard Robinson doing the production design and Arthur Grant as director of photography. The result is a stylish, classy, intelligent and very entertaining horror film. One of Hammer’s best.

Optimum’s Region 2 DVD is a pretty good widescreen print (the screencaps are not from this release).

Frankenstein Created Woman is very highly recommended.

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

In 1938 Universal made a surprising discovery. They re-released the original Frankenstein and Dracula and the two movies, which had cleaned up at the box-office at the beginning of the decade, again did big business. It appeared that the movie-going public’s appetite for horror was as strong as ever. Universal then made the surprisingly sensible decision not only to do a third Frankenstein movie, but to do it properly - with a good cast, a talented director and on a lavish scale. The result, in 1939, was the excellent Son of Frankenstein.

The studio further decided that the cast would be headlined by their two biggest horror stars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, with Peter Lorre as the son of the infamous Dr Frankenstein. Lorre turned them down (he was growing tired of playing psychopathic villains) so they turned to another notable screen villain, Basil Rathbone. It was another inspired decision. As an added bonus they threw in Lionel Atwill as well (always a good move).

Rathbone is Dr Wolf Frankenstein. And he’s not your typical mad scientist at all. He’s a mild-mannered college professor who has spent his career in the US trying to live down the infamous reputation of his father, the Dr Frankenstein who created the notorious monster. He’s a kindly and rather harmless fellow. He’s inherited the Frankenstein Castle and now he thinks it would be a fine idea to move in there with his wife and his young son Why he thought this would be a good idea remains a mystery.

Of course the villagers hate and fear him. They do have reason to be upset. There has been a mysterious series of murders. It can’t be the monster. He was destroyed. But still, these murders are odd.

Wolf Frankenstein naturally has to go and investigate his father’s laboratory. There he finds Ygor. Ygor is a blacksmith by trade but used to earn extra money robbing graves for the elder Dr Frankenstein. He was hanged for his crimes, but survived. His neck was broke but the spinal cord was left intact and he now has a protruding bone in his neck, giving him the classic horror movie hunched appearance. He is now legally dead and therefore beyond the reach of the law, but he has not forgotten the eight man on the jury who convicted him.

Ygor is not the only member of the dead who is still alive. The Monster still lives, apparently in a kind of coma. The Monster was Ygor’s only friend so he begs the younger Dr Frankenstein to bring him back to life. Wolf Frankenstein’s scientific curiosity is aroused along with the idea that he can restore his late father’s reputation by continuing his work. His efforts are unavailing but a few days later his son mentions a giant he has seen and Wolf realises that the Monster walks again. He has other problems - there have been more murders and the village police chief Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) is starting to get distinctly more cool towards him. Krogh lost an arm to the Monster in childhood so he has a personal interest in the scientific endeavours of the Frankenstein family.

The Monster is doing more than walking, the villagers are getting scared and angry and Wolf Frankenstein faces the prospect that history is about to repeat itself.

Boris Karloff again plays the Monster, with Bela Lugosi relegated to the subsidiary role of the the former Dr Frankenstein’s assistant Ygor. Or at least that’s how it seems at first. Actually Ygor is a much more interesting and much more substantial role than that of the Monster. Lugosi gets a lot of screen time and in fact dominates the film. It’s one of the rare occasions in his later career when Lugosi got the better of the deal from Universal. It’s a great role and Lugosi grasps his opportunity with both hands, delivering a powerhouse performance that is one of the highlights of his career. It may even be his best ever performance.

A lot of people dislike Basil Rathbone’s performance, which seems incomprehensible to me. Wolf Frankenstein is a man who, right from the start, finds himself in a situation he is hopelessly ill-prepared for and he starts to lose control of events almost immediately. Rathbone’s performance edges closer and closer to hysteria, just as it should. Wolf is a gentle decent man who is trapped in ever-increasing chaos with no way out. I think it’s a fine performance.

Lionel Atwill is excellent as a man trying to do his duty and trying not to let his personal feelings get in the way. Atwill has a great deal of fun with the mechanical arm which adds a strange touch that is both grotesque and oddly moving.

Willis Cooper wrote the original screenplay, and when it was rejected wrote a second version. Producer-director Rowland V. Lee disliked both versions and started rewriting it himself. He was still rewriting it when shooting began and there never really was a finished final script - Lee just kept rewriting it as he went along. Surprisingly enough it hangs together quite nicely.

Art director Jack Otterson contributed enormously to the film’s success with some of the best sets ever seen in a Universal horror film. All the visual elements in this production are impressive.

This movie was really the last of the Universal horror movies to be an A-picture right from the start. The already generous budget blew out even further as shooting progressed slowly. Luckily for Universal it didn’t matter - the movie was a resounding box-office triumph and made a tidy profit. The budget blow-out did scare Universal though and contributed to their decision to make any future horror movies on much smaller budgets. In hindsight this may have been a mistake - Son of Frankenstein proved that a good well-made handsomely mounted horror film equals box-office gold.

And this is a very good horror film. Visually it’s the equal of anything Universal did, it has a solid story and it has complex characters and great performances (especially from Lugosi). You couldn’t ask for more. Highly recommended.

Rites of Frankenstein (1972)

Rites of Frankenstein (La maldición de Frankenstein) is a classic piece of Jess Franco madness from the early 70s.

Doctor Frankenstein has managed to create an artificial man, but he has a powerful enemy in the form of the magician Cagliostro. Cagliostro has been dead for centuries, but then hasn’t stopped him. Accompanied by his fearsome henchwoman Melisa he breaks into Frankenstein’s castle to steal his creature and his secrets. Melisa is blind and is a kind of birdwoman, with the gift of second sight. And a taste for human flesh. Cagliostro has also set himself up as the leader of a cult, the cult of Panthos, which appears to be mostly composed of dead people.

Frankenstein and his assistant are murdered, but that’s not the end of Frankenstein either. His daughter Vera arrives to continue his work, and is able to revive her father for short periods. She not only wants to continue her father’s experiments, she also wants to avenge his death. There is clearly going to be a major power struggle between Cagliostro and Vera Frankenstein. Also involved, caught in the middle so to speak, is another eminent scientist, Dr Seward. Seward admired Frankenstein without approving of his work.

The plot becomes very convoluted, Vera falls into the clutches of Cagliostro, and there’s lots of trademark Franco weirdness. This is Franco in a fairly playful mood and I don’t think we’re meant to take any of the goings-on all that seriously. But it’s all great fun.

Howard Vernon was often under-utilised in Franco’s movies but this time he has a role he can really sink his teeth into as the diabolical Cagliostro. Dennis Price as Frankenstein is deceased for most of the movie but he still gets to overact even when dead! Anne Libert is very creepy as Melisa. As good as Howard Vernon is in this movie (and he’s very good indeedd) Anne Libert pretty much steals the picture. The movie is also notable for marking the first appearance of Lina Romay in a Jess Franco movie (although it depends which cut of the movie see whether she actually appears or not).

The Image DVD was taken from the Spanish cut which was a “clothed” cut with all the nude scenes reshot with the actors clothed. Image have included all the excised nude scenes as an extra. There are some scenes that don’t really work without the nudity, such as the scene where the painter tells his model she can put her clothes on now when she’s already fully clothed. In the hotter version intended for markets outside of Spain she is of course naked.

The plot is so outrageous that it works. It’s one of those cases where it’s better to go completely over-the-top rather than adopt half-measures, and Franco goes for broke. Having the creature covered in silver paint is an odd touch but it also works.

This is a silly but highly entertaining movie. It probably won’t appeal to you unless you’re a fan of the weirder varieties of eurohorror but if you enjoy horror with lots of strangeness, a dash of surrealism and done with tongue planted firmly in cheek then this one should deliver the goods for you.

Like quite a few of Franco's movies from this era this one exists in several different versions with various titles.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is I think one the best of Hammer Films’ horror movies. It has Terence Fisher, the best of the Hammer directors, at the helm. And it has Peter Cushing at the very top of his form. Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein is chillingly evil because he isn’t just mad - he is absolutely convinced that he is right and that anyone who stands in his way is standing in the way of progress, science and the happiness of the human race. So he feels that he doesn’t just have the right to destroy anyone who gets in his way and to mercilessly exploit anyone who can be useful to him – he has a positive duty to do these things. He’s a much more convincing figure of evil than Christopher Lee’s Dracula and he’s one of the reasons the Hammer Frankenstein films are, overall, better than their Dracula films.

The other reason the Frankenstein films are better is that the formula is more flexible. In Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed Baron Frankenstein is working to develop his technique for transplanting brains. He makes use of a young doctor who works at an asylum. The information he needs to perfect his technique is locked in the brain of a former colleague who is now hopelessly insane.

The supporting cast is excellent with Freddie Jones being particularly good. Art director Bernard Robinson does a particularly good job in this one, and with Fisher’s sure touch as a director the movie looks great. It also moves along at a rapid pace right from the start – the opening sequence is very well done and sets the mood nicely.

There are real chills too, chills that don’t rely on gore - Dr Brandt’s realisation of what Frankenstein has done to him, and then his wife’s realisation of what has been done to her husband, and the growing awareness of Frankenstein’s young assistant and his fiancee that they have been hopelessly entrapped in the baron’s schemes. A very fine example of Hammer horror.

Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

Watching the Revenge of Frankenstein (directed by Terence Fisher in 1958) a couple of days after Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (directed by Freddie Francis in 1968) offers the opportunity to compare an early and a mid-period Hammer gothic horror movie. There’s also a definite contrast in directing styles. You notice immediately that Freddie Francis’s film is moodier and more striking visually (not surprising since he was also a distinguished cinematographer), but Fisher’s movie is a lot more energetic. Terence Fisher’s movies rarely suffer from pacing problems – he gets the story moving straight away and he keeps it moving. In fact as far as plot is concerned Revenge of Frankenstein is not much more than a remake of the original Frankenstein film – Baron Frankenstein has escape execution for his earlier crimes and has resumed his experiments under an assumed name. He has built up a flourishing new practice, and he also works in a hospital for the poor, performing a surprisingly high number of amputations – he does need an abundance of spare part for his experiments! This time he is determined that he’s going to get it right, and his new creation is going to be perfect.

Despite its lack of originality the movie has plenty of vitality and Peter Cushing makes Baron Frankenstein a subtly disturbing and morally ambiguous character, and the result is a very entertaining and very effective movie.

7 out of 10