Directed By: Roy William Neil

MVP’s: Lon Chaney Junior, Maria Ouspenskaya, Bela Lugosi, Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Dennis Hoey, Adia Kuznetzoff, Don Barclay

Plot: Poor Lawrence Talbot has risen from the grave, still cursed from the bite of the beast! What’s a Wolf Man to do but travel to Bavaria? Maybe those Frankenstein’s down round those parts have some idea about how to help a man die at last.

Response: And in the last picture, and in the last picture, and in the last picture. Lon Chaney Jnr. is the saddest dog and I love him so much.

Review: Nowadays you can just cue up the monster smackdown that happens at the very end but what’s the fun in that? Ain’t the main brawl all the sweeter for the 60 minutes of exposition dumps that came before? I’m being facetious but I do mean that.

This is one of those movies that has so much of what would become Halloween iconography baked in that it practically is Halloween. Yes, it’s fairly boring (though the Bavarian village musical number helps) with long stretches where characters we’ve been following (the cop, the doctor, the gypsy woman) are just dropped. Bela’s not given much to do with his sole turn in the Frank suit. James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are much better. The first Wolf Man is better. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein is better. But in the end, so what. Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man you guys. Don’t you want to se what your old friends are up to?

Background: This is the fifth film in the universal Frankenstein series (following Bride, Son & Ghost) and a direct sequel to 1941’s The Wolf Man. The original plan was for Lon Chaney Junior (the real life son of the star of our Day 22 picture) to play both the werewolf and the monster. Karloff had hung up the bolts after Son of Frankenstein and Chaney was there to don them and the flat top in Ghost of Frankenstein so this would have been a reprisal of both parts but that’s a lot of hours in the makeup chair so they got Dracula* himself, Bela Lugosi in as the big green masher. Though the subplot that would have explained a lot of Frank’s behavior was cut. You see, it is now Yigo’rs brain in the monster! Or I guess you don’t see. After this, Universal, I think foolishly, phased Lugosi out for half a decade and went over to RKO and Screen Guild before returning as the King of the Bats in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.

Director, Roy William Neil was an old studio darling and is one of Leonard Martin’s guys. His career began in silents and he directed something like 110 pictures (maybe more). He is best remembered today as being behind the helm for all the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes pictures.

Frankenstein and the Wolf Man both return** in House of Frankenstein***. The story with the Universal monster movies is they found initial and almost immediate success with The Phantom of the Opera, and Hunchback of Notre Dame (Dr. Jekyl preceded both) but that the double-hitter of 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein made the studio’s name synonymous with horror. James Whale made Shelley’s novel so personal and singular that he was greenlit to make the gayer, weirder, funnier, more fabulous, and even more personal, stylish and artistic Bride of Frankenstein. But by the late 30’s the United Kingdom had “banned horror” and Carl Laemmle was wanting to take a break from horror and focus more on melodramas anyway so the studio took a three year hiatus.

When they returned it was with Son of Frankenstein, an expensive picture with lavish sets, competently made, and without an inch of James Whale’s rich ideas. The monster movies would get cheaper, shorter and more restrained from here.

By the time they got to House of Frankenstein they’d settled on a new Franky with Glenn Strange who, like Karloff before him would go on to play the monster three times.

Karloff- Frankenstein, Bride, Son

Chaney- Ghost

Lugosi- Meets Wolfman

Strange- House of Frank, House of Drac, Abbott & Costello