Frankenstein (1931)

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Edward Van Sloan, Dwight Frye

Have I seen it Before: Oh, sure. In fact, I’m more mystified that it has taken me this long in the course of these reviews and not managed to re-watch this one yet. What have I been doing this whole time?

Did I Like It: I mean, I think I get why. I’ve always had a certain partiality to Bride of Frankenstein (1935), so it usually gets my attention when I’m in the mood for anything Whale. The relationship between this film and its sequel is not unlike that of Gremlins (1984) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). One is a perfectly fine horror movie that captured the imagination of people with its iconography and pathos, while the sequel is an exercise in blissful artistic anarchy.

This is not to take away from the original, though. Here, Whale manages to still tap into his better instincts more often than not with a perfect exercise in tone, supported by perfect (and yes, sometimes perfectly campy) performances, right from the little fellow (Van Sloan, who is unrecognizable from his later role as Dr. Waldman or even his Van Hellsing in Dracula (1931)) who comes out from behind the curtain before the film to warn us about what we are about to experience* to the blustery Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr).

I would put it at the very top of the early Universal horror films, just a hair below its transcendent sequel, but certainly ahead of Dracula, which may yet qualify as a sedative.

* I don’t know why more movies didn’t do this back then or even now, as it is legitimately charming and even here manages to be a little unnerving, promising horrors that might have diminished in the last 90 years. I mean, I do get it. The preamble was added by a studio afraid that the God-fearing in the movie houses would riot if they saw a man try to give life on a corpse. Once they only mildly objected, future horror films could get away with just letting reel one being without additional comment.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Director: James Whale

Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Elsa Lancaster

Have I Seen it Before: Many, many times. My earliest memory of the film ties directly to a Universal Monsters coloring book released in the 1990s. At this point, I just need to find another copy of that thing, right? Beyond that, I plum wore out a VHS recording from Turner Classic Movies. One of the more purely delightful moviegoing experiences in my life was going to a library-hosted* screening of the film in the early 00s**. When I first joined Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, this was my first choice for a movie for the polterguides to watch. The idea that it has taken this long to re-watch the film since starting these reviews in 2018 is kind of flabbergasting, but after watching <Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)> for my guest spot on Horror Hangover, I just couldn’t help myself.

Yes. Yes, I have seen Bride of Frankenstein before.

Did I Like It: There’s isn’t much more I can do to tip my hand after that previous section and its myriad footnotes. Bride is the greatest of the Universal Monster movies, is in my top 10 films of all time, and may just edge out Halloween (1978) as my favorite horror movie of all time***.

It is weird. It is funny far more often than it has any right to be. Every character, from Mary Shelley (Lancaster) in he film’s prologue, all the way to the Bride’s (Lancaster, again) arrival in the finale—is more interesting and vibrant than the one who appeared just before. The film is heartbreaking and often filled with a perfectly packaged, unrelenting sense of dread.

And it accomplishes all of this in the span of 75 minutes. If a measure of cinematic efficiency—with pleasures-over-runtime being the metric—is at all a fair judge of film, then this is the single most efficient feature film ever made.

If you haven’t seen this movie before, you must stop everything you are doing and watch it now. If it’s been a while, you need to drop everything and be reminded how truly good it is. If you’ve watched it recently, there is no harm in giving it another go, just as a treat.

*It’s honestly at the core of a lot of the work I’m trying to do at the moment, now that I’m thinking about it.

**It had been a date, no less. Needless to say, things didn’t work out. The films of James Whale may not be the opening romantic salvo that I always thought they should be, but I’m blessed to have ended up with someone who at least tolerates the Universal Monsters.

***Such rankings are arbitrary. At any given moment, this movie or Halloween is superior. They both rank, and very likely may be equal in their superlative quality.

House of Dracula (1945)

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.

House of Frankenstein (1944)

Director: Erle C. Kenton

Cast: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, J. Carroll Naish

Have I Seen it Before: As with nearly the entire canon of Universal Monsters, I marched through an entire box set of the films a number of years ago, just before I started these reviews.

Did I Like It: There’s a pulpy quality to these later Universal horror films whose charms can’t quite be denied. It also gives the pretext for what would one day become Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), one of the great films not just of the series, but of all time. Each of the individual properties in the Universal Horror canon have maybe grown beyond the point where they could sustain their own films, so we engage in big-time meetups. At the time, it was the province of B-movies. Now, it’s one of the governing commercial principles of the movies.

This film is slight, befitting its status, but there are charms beyond just the the idea of a monster mashup which keep this individual film lively. Karloff is here, which is good, but he’s sadly (if understandably) not playing Frankenstein’s Monster. The most ubiquitous version of the monster is not actually from Karloff’s depiction of the character in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), or Son of Frankenstein (1939), but instead Glenn Strange’s portrayal here and throughout the rest of the series. It’s one of those strange bummers of film history—and this film in particular— which I wished I didn’t know.

Oddly enough, the cell-animated bats used for one of Dracula’s (Carradine*) other forms are—while not good—somehow better than the dangling puppets used all-too regularly during Lugosi’s original film.

*We thankfully don’t have to suffer through Chaney’s mumbling attempts at the Count from Son of Dracula (1943) from a year prior. Chaney sticks to The Wolf Man, what he does best.