Director: Jimmy Sangster
Writers: Jeremy Burnham, Jimmy Sangster
Stars: Ralph Bates, Kate O’Mara, Veronica Carlson
Run Time: 1 Hour,35 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2AnlgMw
Synopsis
Victor Frankenstein sits in his classroom and doodles, since he’s already finished his assignment. He’s way smarter than the professor, and he knows it. He has friends and a girlfriend and other than being smart, he seems pretty normal. His father, the baron, is a pervert, boinking Elys the maid, and the old man refuses to finance his son’s hobbies. The two do not get along.
Victor asks to go to university, and the baron replies. “You’ll see me in my grave before I let you go off to Vienna for a few years.” Victor sabotages the father’s gun to explode. The dead body thing happens a lot faster than the old man expected. Victor then goes off to school. It’s not long until he gets the Dean’s daughter pregnant. The old dean insists that Victor marry the girl. Victor decides it’s a good time to take time off from school.
Victor’s got a human arm in his room, and he hooks it to a little wind-up generator. When the generator comes on, the arm makes an obscene gesture. “I think I’ll send it to the headmaster,” he quips. On the way back home, Victor and new friend Wilhelm shoot a bandit and kill him, rescuing old friend Elizabeth and her father.
Wilhelm and Victor start unpacking lab equipment. Another old friend, Henry has joined the police and stop by to talk about the shooting of the highwayman. It turns out the man’s head had been cut off. Victor denies knowledge of anything.
Victor steals a favorite pet turtle from Elizabeth’s father. They kill the turtle and hook it up to Victor’s machines. They turn on the power and manage to “jump start” the turtle; insert “Frankentortoise joke” here.
Next, Victor wants to make a person. He hires a man to bring him bodies. The parts start arriving, and Wilhelm warns him to stop, as things are getting out of control. A boat capsizes, and Victor winds up with a pile of corpses to work with. He starts cutting them up, and Elys watches him through the door. He dumps the leftover parts into a vat of acid.
Wilhelm quits and threatens to tell the authorities what Victor is doing. “Nothing I say will change your mind?” Victor asks, right before electrocuting Wilhelm. He then poisons Elizabeth’s father because he needs a fresh brain. Elizabeth is now penniless, and she goes to Victor for help. Elys doesn’t like this one bit, and she uses her influence to persuade Victor otherwise.
The grave robber drops the brain and it gets punctured with broken glass. Victor pushes him into the acid tank, and that’s one less loose end. Finally, all the parts are assembled, and there’s an electrical storm overhead. Victor throws the switch, and lightning strikes. The monster awakens and escapes nearly immediately, and then the killing out in the countryside begin. Victor frames his chef for the murder and then recaptures the monster and chains him in the basement.
The grave robber’s wife comes looking for him, and she threatens to go to the police. Victor sends the monster after her, and he kills her easily. Henry the policeman starts suspecting Victor may be hiding the killer. Elys tries to blackmail Victor, so he shoves her in with the monster. One less problem.
He gets out again and attacks a little girl is seen returning to the castle; he attacks Elizabeth, who sees him but does survive. She tells Henry, who charged up to the lab, but Victor has hidden the monster in the drained acid pit. The little girl pulls the rope and dissolves the monster in acid. The police leave, never knowing what really happened.
Commentary
There are many characters in this, and a lot of backstory and fun details as well. There’s a lot of humor here, maybe more than necessary. If you look at the story beats and basic plot outline, it’s the same as 1957’s “Curse of Frankenstein.” There’s enough humor and witty dialog and editing that you really have to pay attention to see that it’s so close to the same story.
Ralph Bates replaces Peter Cushing in an attempt to attract a younger audience, and he is excellent here. This was his third or fourth Hammer film in just a few years.
The monster is played by David Prowse, the bodybuilder who played inside Darth Vader’s suit in all the Star Wars films. He’s a bodybuilder, so he looks way too developed for an assembled monster. Then again, Frankenstein always claimed he wanted to build the perfect man, so maybe his beefiness isn’t that unexpected. He’s got big, veiny forehead, but otherwise looks like a normal-ish human. He’s the least-interesting looking Frankenstein of all the hammer films.