Director: Erle C. Kenton
Cast: Lon Chaney, Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill
Have I Seen it Before: As with the rest of the Universal monsters, I viewed everything in that canon just before I set about writing these reviews. This one lives interchangeably in my memory with House of Frankenstein (1944).
Did I Like It: Which doesn’t exactly bode well for a review.
The charms of the monster mashup on spec exist, but there is something diminished here. Maybe the war had just ended and America was in too good of a mood to create grand horror entertainments just yet. Maybe it’s that Karloff has moved on from the Universal horror canon after the previous film. Just as much as I missed the presence of Karloff in the role of Frankenstein’s Monster in that previous film, I now miss him altogether. Ah, well. There’s always the chance to go back to the James Whale-directed Frankenstein films to relive the glory days of the series.
Ultimately, the films scant runtime ensure that it can’t wear out its welcome, even if it doesn’t quite make a case for its own existence. To say that it is slightIndeed, I’m finding it a challenge to come up with the necessary 300 words to fill an entire review. It is nice to see Dracula (Carradine) even briefly reckon with his own monstrous quality, even it is mostly used as grift for a B Sci-Fi plot. It’s also good that Universal kept making these films, as it will eventually begat the superlative Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and contribute to the enjoyable The Monster Squad (1987), and create a framework that has allowed Marvel Studios to create largely engaging (if occasionally exhausting) entertainments for the foreseeable future.