Director: Terence Fisher
Writer: Anthony Hinds
Stars: Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg, Thorley Walters
Run Time: 1 Hour, 28 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2Rf7twA
Synopsis
We open on a shot of the guillotine. A man is to be beheaded, and he yells jokes and curses at the priest. The man sees his son, Hans, standing there watching him, and he sobers up quickly. The boy watches the decapitation and runs off. Credits roll.
Hans is now grown up and he hears voices when he sees the guillotine. He works for Dr. Hertz, who is working on freezing people. He’s got Dr. Frankenstein frozen in a coffin in his lab. They manage to revive him with electricity. Frankenstein wants to know if he could trap a soul in a body.
Hans has a crush on Christina, the barkeeper’s daughter. She has a deformed face, and is very ashamed of it. Three young troublemakers force their way into the tavern and make fun of Christina. Hans comes to her defense, but the fight doesn’t end well for anyone.
Christina and Hans talk, and all she wants is to look normal and not have to hide her face. Hans doesn’t care; he’s in love with her right now, but she can’t get over her own face.
Frankenstein and Hertz are working late in their lab. They use electricity to make a glass indestructible. He thinks it can give life after death. He believes he can trap the soul inside a body by using a sort of force field.
The three troublemakers break into the tavern and kill Christina’s father when he returns. Hans sees Christina off on her trip to see another doctor, but as he returns home, the police nab him for the murder. The three troublemakers testify against him at the trial, and he is quickly found guilty. He is sentenced to be beheaded tomorrow.
Frankenstein sees this as a valuable opportunity. They plan to take Hans’s soul and preserve it in order to put it into another dead body. Christina returns just in time to see Hans’s head roll. Christina then drowns herself in the river.
Frankenstein and Hertz do their thing, and soon they have Hans’s soul trapped. Meanwhile, the villages find Christina’s body and take her to Hertz. So now they have Christina’s body with no soul and Hans’s soul with no body. They wouldn’t, would they?
They do. They also fix her face while they’re at it.
Before long, Christina has questions that no one really wants to answer. Finally, they take her to the guillotine, and then she remember’s Hans’s father being killed there.
That night, Christina wakes up in a trance and goes out on a revenge spree– One. Two. Three…
Before long, the villagers come to the conclusion that witchcraft is at work, and maybe the crazy Baron has something to do with it. Frankenstein can prove that Hans is dead; all they have to do is dig up the body. except when they do, the head is now missing. Frankenstein actually tells the truth to the police in order to hunt Christina down.
Frankenstein hops in a carriage and rushes out to prevent the next murder. He catches up to Christina, who jumps off a cliff and dies.
Commentary
This is not a continuation of the previous Hammer Frankenstein films, it’s more of a soft reboot or alternate universe kind of story. Frankenstein is still the Baron, and he has not yet created a monster by the beginning of the film.
Frankenstein looks quite a bit older in this film than the previous incarnations. It had only been a year or so since the previous film, so it’s not a matter of Peter Cushing aging, this was a directorial choice. There is also something wrong with his hands in this film, so he need Hertz to do the surgeries for him. Not only that, but Frankenstein tries to prevent the murders and regrets his decisions in the end. He’s clearly not the evil scientist portrayed in the earlier Hammer films.
Kevin joked toward the end that this was a lot like “I Spit on Your Grave.” Although it’s not nearly that gory, the main theme and plot is definitely there. This is a revenge film more than anything else.