Director: Roy William Neill
Writer: Curt Siodmak (original screenplay)
Stars: Lon Chaney Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Bela Lugosi
1 Hour, 14 Minutes
Synopsis
A pair of grave robbers enter the cemetery at night. They stand outside the Talbot crypt. They get in through a window and look at the various tombs, because they’re looking for a specific one: Lawrence Talbot. They think he was buried with money on his body. One thief finds wolfsbane in the tomb and he remembers the famous werewolf poem.
The moon comes up, shining its light on Larry’s face. He looks surprisingly well preserved. He reaches up and grabs one of the thieves, while the other gets away.
Larry wakes up in the hospital. He’s just had an operation. The police found him and assumed he’d been mugged. Inspector Owen asks a lot of questions, but Larry doesn’t know what happened. He calls the local police and the cops says Lawrence Talbot died four years ago.
That night, it’s the full moon again. We see him change this time (a nice, smooth transition), and he’s soon out and about, attacking a policeman. The next morning, he’s back in his hospital bed claiming he killed someone last night, and he now thinks he cannot die. The doctor says it couldn’t have been him, because the man who died was killed by a wild animal. Larry admits it all to the Inspector, the whole story, and of course they think he’s crazy.
The inspector travels to Manwaring and checks out the crypt. They find the body of the grave robber. They look at a photo of Talbot, and yes, that is him. Talbot, however, has chewed through his straight jacket and escaped. Larry goes to see Maleva, the old gypsy woman. She knows a man who has the power to help him.
They travel together to see Dr. Frankenstein, but he’s dead, and his castle is in ruins. Larry wolfs it up again that night, and another villager dies. The villagers storm up the hill in pursuit, but the Wolf Man hides in the rubble of the castle, falling through the floor into a hidden chamber.
The villagers arrest Maleva, and Larry wakes up the next morning in the frozen tomb of the monster. Larry digs out the monster, now played by Bela Lugosi. The monster shows Larry to the doctor’s vault of secret books, but what he wants isn’t there. Larry wants to meet the doctor’s daughter, but she refuses to let him have the books.
There’s a big celebration that night. Larry freaks out when the singer says something he shouldn’t, and in the commotion, Doctor Mannering from the hospital recognizes Larry. He followed the newspaper reports of dead bodies. Talbot just wants to die; he’s given up on a cure. A nosy villager overhears their conversation.
And then the monster walks into town, crashing the party in a big way. He and Larry make a getaway in a wagon, but everyone sees it. They all head up to the ruins in search of Talbot or the monster. The Baroness gives Talbot and Mannering her father’s diary. They learn the secret of life, but Talbot wants to die, not live forever.
Dr. Mannering reads the book and starts to repair the machine. The villagers wonder why Dr. Mannering has ordered a bunch of machines to be delivered to the ruins of the castle. These are the stupidest villagers on the face of the Earth.
Mannering finishes the machine. The Baroness warns him not to let his new power go to his head. He wires up Larry and the Monster that night. The plan is to connect the positive to the positive and the negative to the negative and kill them both. Instead, he does it the right way; he wants to see the monster at its full power. The monster gives an evil smile.
The Baroness screams and pulls a switch that shuts down all the equipment. Meanwhile, Vazec sets dynamite around the dam upriver, and the full moon comes out. The monster attacks the Baroness, but the Wolf Man comes to her rescue.
The two monsters fight epically, and we see Vazec light the fuse to the dynamite. The dam blows up, and the castle floods while they fight. The rest of the castle falls with the monsters inside. They gotta be dead this time, right?
Commentary
This story moves fast, mostly assuming we know who all the characters are already. The castle blew up at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein, and Dr. Frankenstein was killed then too, but there’s no sign of Ygor’s brain in the monster, so they decided to pick and choose what to carry over from the previous film.
Maleva, now a fairly major character, doesn’t seem anywhere near as old or creepy as in the first movie, even though she was trying to help in both films.