Eh, this was okay. It just misses so many opportunities and it wastes Karloff in what could have been a good role. Here's the setup. Baron Victor von Frankenstein (that would be Boris, natch) has agreed to allow an American film company to shoot in his castle. The most amusing part of the film is how much the Baron obviously loathes the brassy Hollywood troupe and doesn't try to hide it; I guess most of this was Karloff's own distaste this way, especially for this particular movie.
Meanwhile, down in the secret laboratory in the crypt down in the basement, the Baron is of course trying to make a Monster like his famous ancestor. He has the darndest time getting anywhere with this, everything goes wrong. At one point, he gets a pair of new eyes for the Monster out of an ordinary refrigerator in the lab (how mundane) and clumsily drops them on the floor. Damn. (Karloff snaps his fingers and slaps his hand against his thigh as if he had locked his keys in his car.) Needing parts, the Baron starts murdering servants and assorted members of the film crew. Does this seem like a good idea? Does it seem like no one will miss a film crew and some stars, of all people? Sheesh.
But then, the Baron doesn't seem to have given much thought to anything in his project. He really has nothing much in mind to do with his Monster when he gets it up and lurching around the castle. Not revenge on anyone, not fame with the scientific community. The Baron is all scarred and crippled, with a bad limp and other problems he alludes to as being from torture by the Nazis. Now, the big reveal at the end is (wait for it) the Baron gave the Monster his own younger face. Fair enough. I suppose if he had a plan of somehow getting his brain transplanted into the creature, he could swap his hacked-up old body for a towering powerful carcass with his own face. Not a bad deal.
Aside from Karloff, the rest of the cast is nothing special. The Baron's business manager Gottfried and the humble servant Shuter aside, everyone is a bitter wisecracking unlikeable Hollywood phony. The ingenue (Jana Lund) is okay but bland, I suppose. The film itself lacks that dramatic flair a good drive-in movie needs. It's flat. The Monster is brought to life, not in a lightning storm with buzzing gadgets and horrified onlookers, but just being slid into a big oven on a tray. It's as exciting as making a pizza. The Monster himself is a dud. He is big enough, played by a guy well over six feet, wrapped entirely in bandages including mittened hands and for some reason, his head is in a cylinder that looks rather like a wastepaper basket. And he has no personality good or bad, he just sluggishly stumbles around following orders (well, his brain did come from the Baron's butler) until he goes on a brief half-hearted rampage on the very end.
Submitted May 01, 2015 at 02:47AM by dr_hermes http://ift.tt/1bHlV99 horror
