House of Frankenstein (1944) Review

House of Frankenstein (1944) Review 

 

House of Frankenstein came out a year after Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which once again brought together both monsters, as well as threw Dracula in for good measure, though the title was misleading, because it really doesn’t have much to do with Frankenstein’s house. Both Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. get top billing in the opening credits, but Karloff isn’t back as The Monster, a role he played in the first three Frankenstein films. Chaney isn’t The Monster either (he played the role in The Ghost of Frankenstein), he’s back as The Wolf Man, and Karloff plays a new character: Dr. Neimann, the brother of Frankenstein's assistant. He wants to continue Frankenstein’s work, but he’s in prison next to his assistant, a hunchback named Daniel. Mad scientists having hunchbacked assistants was already becoming a horror trope.

Neimann and Daniel both escape the prison one stormy night and join up with a travelling sideshow of horrors, which includes in its collection the skeleton of Count Dracula! The sinister duo take over the horror exhibit by killing the original owners and pretending to run the show. Neimann takes on the showman role very convincingly, but that's only because Karloff is always a good actor. Karloff is the best, I could watch him in anything, and he revels in the sinister dialogue from beginning to end. He removes the stake from Dracula's skeleton and The Count reanimates, but then he threatens the newly awakened monster with the same stake and tells him to follow his commands. Dracula obeys without question. What happened to Dracula's hypnotic stare? Why couldn’t he just evade Neimann as soon as he reanimated? Maybe he’s just weak from having been a skeleton for so long.  

There is a young couple on their honeymoon with the woman’s grandfather tagging along and they get involved with Neimann/Daniel/Dracula, but their involvement feels kind of random. I think they were included just to add variety to the story so it wasn’t just another tale of a mad scientist. They have a glass of wine with Dracula (who uses a false identity) and he seduces the woman with a magic ring while her husband is using the bathroom, then he leaves, only to come back shortly after and attack her grandfather. He turns into a bat in silhouette and it looks more comical than scary. The honeymooning couple disappears from the story after this.

After Dracula’s one and only murder in this movie, a big chase ensues with horses and carriages. The authorities are after Dracula, and Daniel shoves Dracula’s coffin out the back of their carriage. Dracula goes after it and ends up turning back into a skeleton in the sunlight. It's not a very satisfying plot line for Dracula fans; he’s weak, doesn’t get to do much, and never meets the other monsters. Neimann and Daniel continue on to Visaria in search of Frankenstein's castle, and come across a woman dancing. The fiddles playing as she dances sound way too cheery for a scene following the death of Dracula. The scene feels like filler, and Daniel gets creepily fixated on the dancer. He saves her from being whipped by her boss and brings her along for the rest of the journey. Even though he is creepy, he’s far less creepy than Lugosi’s Ygor hunchback of previous films. Daniel means well and hits it off with the dancer at first, but when she gets a look at that hunch back, she isn’t quite as turned on.  

Beneath the castle they find the glacial cavern where Larry Talbot discovered Frankenstein’s monster frozen in the last movie. This time both The Monster and the Wolf Man are frozen down there. Neimann’s plan: set them both free because they might know where Frankenstein’s records are. It’s essentially the same plan Larry had last time, only even more nonsensical somehow. Wolf Man thaws first, changes back into Larry, and has a conversation with Neimann. It’s great to see Chaney and Karloff together, even though their dialogue isn’t the best. Neimann offers to build Larry a new brain to lift his curse. How the hell will that help? A new brain would mean a new person in Larry’s body, wouldn't it? What would happen to Larry’s brain? Larry likes the sound of the plan anyway. The dancer becomes attracted to the cursed man, which makes Daniel sad. They get the monster back to Neimann’s lab, but the doctor has to restore the monster first because being frozen messed it up (unlike last time).

After a quick montage the lab is back in order and the monster is ready for the procedure. Larry is impatient because the moon will be full again that night, but Neimann is more concerned with restoring the monster and following his own vengeful agenda. In order to protect her, a jealous Daniel explains to the dancer that Larry is a werewolf, but she thinks he’s lying and tells him to his face that she hates him, and she thinks he’s mean, and ugly! Brutal. The moon comes up and the Wolf Man comes out, but the transformation isn’t shown. The laboratory scene with the resurrection of the monster is better in this movie than the previous one, though, so you win some, you lose some.

The classic angry mob manages to assemble before the big ending. Larry turns into the Wolf Man (we get to see him transform this time), the dancer shoots him with a silver bullet as he attacks, she dies on top of his dead body, and Daniel is devastated. He blames Neimann, so turns on him and tries to choke him to death—damn, Daniel! But then the monster breaks free and throws Daniel out a window before carrying Neimann away as the mob pursues them. Neimann warns the monster not to go into the bog, but it disregards his warning, and both of them sink to their doom in the final minute of the film. It's a rollercoaster of an ending. I can't believe how much they packed into the 70 minute runtime, but I really can’t believe this ending in particular. What I just described in this paragraph all occurs in only the last 10 minutes.  

House of Frankenstein is all over the place. It doesn’t progress the stories much for the Wolf Man or Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula, but still has some great moments, and the focus on Neimann and Daniel is satisfying in the absence of more significant scenes with the big headliner monsters. This one has never been one of my favourite monster mashups, but I still enjoy it, and if you want a quick paced movie featuring all the best monsters, plus a villainous Boris Karloff, it’s worth checking out. 

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) Review

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) Review

 

The Wolf Man/Larry Talbot is such a tragic character, and the sequel continues his tragic tale, while also serving as the fifth entry in the Frankenstein series, following Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and The Ghost of Frankenstein. This was the first time two characters from two different series’ of films crossed paths, and it would be far from the last time.

The opening shots are as iconic as anything from the original Wolf Man, with a dark, windy graveyard on a night lit up by the full moon. A couple of grave robbers break into the tomb of the Talbots, find Larry buried with wolfsbane, and one of them recites the poem from The Wolf Man, with a slight alteration: when the moon is fully bright. Larry comes back to life and escapes his tomb, then is taken to a hospital, unconscious from a skull fracture. He wakes up and tries to piece together what happened. Lon Chaney Jr. is just as great as before, with his sad, glassy eyes and moping expressions. Investigators discover that Lawrence Talbot died four years ago, but dying doesn’t make a difference to a cursed man.

Larry changes into the Wolf Man in the hospital bed on the full moon and we see the transformation on his face, accomplished by Chaney lying in one place as more makeup and hair were applied to him with the camera staying in one place, with the frames dissolving to show the progression. He attacks a police officer in an alley at night, then wakes up in the hospital bed the next morning. He knows what his unfortunate reality is now: he’s a murderer, but he also realizes he can’t die, so it kind of makes him like a zombie, except he has his mind, so it’s more like a form of immortality, though not a desirable one. In this first part of the film there is a doctor and an inspector dealing with Larry, but they aren’t very interesting characters.

Larry escapes the hospital and goes looking for Maleva (the old gypsy woman from The Wolf Man) to find out how he can die, but she can’t help, though she does know someone else who can: Dr. Frankenstein! Only problem? He’s dead. His notes may still exist in the ruins of the castle, though, so Larry goes looking. He turns into the Wolf Man again and the townsfolk think Frankenstein's monster might be on the loose once more, but a villager reminds everyone the monster burned to death. The angry mob is quick to hunt down the Wolf Man. It's an exciting pursuit, and Wolfie ends up falling into a frozen cave. Larry changes back to human form and discovers Frankenstein's monster frozen in ice! So, apparently the monster didn’t get destroyed in a fire. Also, the inside of the castle is in shambles, but the exterior seems fine…even though it was completely blown up in The Ghost of Frankenstein. We’ll get into more continuity errors soon.

The monster wakes up real quick and Larry helps it out, certain it knows where Dr. Frankenstein's notes are in the wreckage of the old castle. He finds no notes, but Frankenstein's daughter might know, so he arranges to meet with her under the pseudonym Taylor and the false pretenses that he wants to buy the land. Their interaction is a bit dry, and initially she won’t help him. What follows are some scenes at a festival with lots of singing gypsies, which feels a little out of place. It’s certainly not as gripping as the scenes with gypsies in the original Wolf Man. Then, Maleva, baroness Frankenstein, and the doctor who was treating Larry at the hospital go to the Frankenstein castle ruins to help Larry and confirm Frankenstein’s monster is still alive. It's kind of cool to see Larry so confident when dealing with the monster, but it also makes the monster feel less scary than before, and its lack of speech makes it feel less like a character than in past movies.  

Dr. Frankenstein’s old machines somehow survived the fire in the castle, so they repair them, but the buildup to the big conclusion feels slow. Larry just waits around and the villagers back in the village chit chat. The doctor and baroness, meanwhile, decide they should actually destroy the monster and Larry with the machines, but Larry thinks he’s going to have his life energy transferred to the monster. Wouldn’t you know it? The night of the big procedure happens on a full moon! The doctor lights up the electrodes and decides to restore the monster to its full power just to see what happens. They couldn’t help slipping in a mad scientist character at the last second. I guess it just couldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without one.

Meanwhile, a villager rigs the dam behind the castle with dynamite to get rid of the monsters and the castle once and for all. The two monsters finally meet in the final moments of the film and have a short fight before the dam blows up and a flood washes them and the remains of the castle away. Is the ending disappointing? Yes and no. It’s plenty exciting, the miniatures are pretty great, and the fight is fun despite being short. But, the ending does feel a bit rushed and the meeting of the monsters is pretty brief, though it isn’t like a big fight between them is teased the whole movie. Remember, this is the first time two major characters had ever been in a crossover film like this, so it was a novel concept, and the fact that they fight at all is kind of miraculous. Because it was the first movie of its kind, the producers weren’t too concerned with how well it blended the two different series of films, which brings me to the issues of continuity.

The Wolf Man is set in modern day (1941), but Frankenstein took place long ago if it’s to be believed the original movie is set when the novel is set (1800’s). The monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man doesn’t speak, and walks around as if blind...because it is! At the end of Ghost of Frankenstein Ygor’s brain is put into the monster’s body. Ygor was played by Bela Lugosi, and fittingly enough, Lugosi plays the monster in this one. But, they cut all his dialogue because test audiences allegedly laughed at Lugosi's voice for the monster. They don’t explain that this monster is still blind, which is also something that happened at the end of Ghost, so he appears bumbling for no reason. Some of these details are the sources for the wider pop culture understanding of these monsters; werewolves are now famous for changing on the full moon only, and the Frankenstein monster is often referred to incorrectly as Frankenstein, as well as being depicted as lumbering with its arms stretched out.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man has a less streamlined story compared to previous films in either series, but it has some great scenes interspersed with some uninteresting ones. Lon Chaney Jr. carries the movie on his shoulders and is reliably great, but the characters and story surrounding him are of lesser quality compared to earlier films. It works much better as a second entry to The Wolf Man series than a fifth entry in the Frankenstein series.

The Wolf Man (1941) Review

 

The Wolf Man (1941) Review

 

Welcome back to Clayton’s Creepy Cinema!

In my first marathon of October reviews I looked at a couple of my favourite classic Universal monster movies, as well as a remake of one, The Wolfman from 2010. My opinion still stands that it is a pretty decent remake, and compared to the other “horror” efforts Universal cranked out over the past decade, it’s easily the best (forget about 2014’s Dracula Untold and 2017’s The Mummy). The 2020 remake of The Invisible Man was pretty good, but it was produced by Blumhouse (though still a Universal release) and unrelated to the intended shared universe of new films that was supposed to begin with The Mummy 2017.

For the first series in this year’s Sequel-a-Thon, I’m going to look at the original cinematic universe. That’s right, long before The Avengers were teaming up across the MCU, the classic monsters from the horror films by Universal Studios appeared in crossover films (how appropriately ironic Universal was the first to create a cinematic universe). It was the first of its kind. The initial crossover was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but let’s begin with the original Wolf Man, because it’s one of the greatest Universal monster movies, one of the most important examples of werewolves in film, and simply an all-time classic for horror cinema.

We get a fun title screen with some great music for the opening, and a short intro of the actors/characters with clips from the movie. I like the style of starting a movie this way, and miss this now-abandoned technique—going back to Marvel for a second, imagine if Avengers: Age of Ultron opened with something like this, how much better would that intro have been than just an overblown action scene? They did do something similar to end Avengers: Endgame with the actors signatures over images/clips, but that was after the end credits had already started. What follows The Wolf Man character intros definitely feels a little dated and clunky, though: a text definition of lycanthropy, or werewolf-ism. But, little time is wasted in getting to the story after this. In fact, little time in general is wasted with these Universal classics. The entire runtime clocks in at just over 70 minutes—and that’s pretty much average for all the debut films of these iconic monsters.

A hunting accident killed Larry Talbot’s brother, and brought Larry home to be reunited with his estranged father Sir John Talbot, played by Claude Rains (who played the Invisible Man in the 1933 original). Lon Chaney Jr. is immediately charming as Larry, and he soon charms a young woman, Gwen, who works at a shop in town. He looks to buy a cane with a silver handle in the shape of a wolf from her, and learns about werewolves. It establishes plenty of the classic lore, but there are some details included that didn’t always end up being present in later werewolf stories, like the pentagram appearing in the palm of the werewolf’s next victim.

The sets are extremely atmospheric, and a major part of what makes the movie so chilling, with fog and gloom and shadows and gnarled trees. There’s something about the environments in The Wolf Man that have stood the test of time in the same way as Dracula’s castle or Frankenstein’s laboratory. Speaking of Dracula, he’s in this, sort of. Bela Lugosi (who played Dracula in the 1931 version) plays a gypsy fortune teller, and he’s great as always. Larry is attacked by a wolf when he tries to rescue Gwen's friend Jenny, but Jenny is killed, found the next day with her throat torn out, and the fortune teller (funny enough, named Bela) is found beaten to death by Larry's cane. Larry remembers nothing. It’s a little silly when they accuse him of murder and he says he has the bite of the wolf to prove it was a wolf that did it, so he opens his shirt, looks, and goes: huh, must've healed up overnight, just like that. We the viewers don’t actually see the wound, but don’t you think Larry would be more than a little curious as to how such a serious injury could heal so fast? It’s a minor point, but does strike me as odd.

Larry is attracted to Gwen, who is engaged to another guy, Frank. Frank thinks Larry is a tragic man, and it makes the relationships between the characters more interesting. Larry meets with Maleva, the mother of the dead fortune teller Bela, and she lays it all out for him: he’s a werewolf, and he needs to deal with it. It’s a classic scene, and Maleva is a great character, too, with her distinct accent. Not long after, Larry changes into the Wolf Man for the first time. The transformation is slow; he sits in a chair, and through dissolves we see more hair grow on his legs and his feet turn into paws. He attacks a villager at night in the woods. The music is great and the makeup by Jack Pierce is awesome, even though you can see some of the seams. The Wolf Man always felt unique not just because of how human-like Larry’s alter-ego remains, but the design is one-of-a-kind, with that big afro and Lon Chaney Jr.’s expressions coming through the makeup. We only see Wolf Man in three scenes, but it feels like more than enough, and I mean that in the best way.

This idea that there is good and evil in every man's soul comes through quite strong in the story. It’s a surprisingly philosophical look at a classic concept, most famous before this in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Larry seeks to be cured of his curse before he hurts anyone else, so John fastens Larry to a chair to help him realize it's all in his head. Larry asks him to take the silver cane, and it's a good thing he does, because Larry gets out of his restraints and is hunted by the townsfolk. Larry (as the Wolf Man) pursues Gwen and chokes her out before John fights him to the death. We get a reverse transformation from monster to human which is cool, and John realizes his son was right all along...and, he just killed him. It's a very dramatic ending with everything wrapped up in a fittingly tragic way.

Even beyond the monster, the characters and dialogue are impactful and memorable. There’s this great line from Sir John: “You police are always in such a hurry, as if dead men don't have an eternity.” Or the classic poem recited more than once: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night; May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Those much-repeated words are actually original to this screenplay, but have been misremembered as an actual legend predating the film. Strangely enough, there are some omissions of the usual werewolf movie fare: no full transformation from man to wolf is shown, and no full moon is shown at any point. In the lore of this movie, the transformation occurs when wolfsbane blooms, not just when the moon is full, and the curse is firmly within the realm of the supernatural.

The Wolf Man is right up there as one of the best horror movies of its era. I didn’t love it as much when I was younger, but I grew to appreciate it more as I got older, and I find it gets better every time I watch it. No sequel could duplicate it or top it in terms of its well-rounded cast or screenplay, but each sequel was worthy of carrying the legacy in different ways.