You might be wondering how Universal managed to squeeze one more movie out of their worn-out, ill-used monsters. And you'd be wise to wonder that, especially since Dracula (John Carradine) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.) were killed off in rather permanent ways in House of Frankenstein.
But logic never stopped the studio before, and it didn't even slow them down this time: Drac and Furboy show up again like the previous movie hadn't even happened. Dracula shows up at the doorstep of kindly Dr. Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) and says he wants to be cured. Larry Talbot shows up and says he wants to die (we know, Larry, we know). Dracula infects Edelmann with some of his blood, turning him into a Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of mad scientist, but Dracula gets destroyed anyway well before the end of the movie...with his name in the title. Talbot, on the other hand, has brain surgery and is cured. (Good! Maybe he'll stop bitching now....)
Only the Frankenstein Monster (again played stiffly by stunt actor Glenn Strange) shows up again with any sort of continuity involved: he's dug out of the quicksand he sank in in the previous movie, still clutching the now-skeletal remains of Dr. Neimann (played by a stunt skeleton, not Boris Karloff). Of course, the now-mad Neimann wants to charge up the Monster (doesn't everybody?) and use him to rule the world (or something like that). The Monster gets up, wrecks the lab and burns the joint down. And Larry Talbot actually survives this time--so, for once, he gets a happy ending.
Universal thought so little of their monsters by this point that they just recycled footage from the conclusion of Ghost of Frankenstein for the lab fire (yes, even showing close-ups of Chaney as the Monster going up in flames again) like none of us had ever seen that movie, even though it had been released just three years before.
What a sad, shabby, cheap way to bring to an end one of the most famous series in film . Or was this really the end? Watch Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and judge for yourself.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment