Frankenstein Monster - Wendell Doig

Frankenstein & The Monster From Hell [VHS]

August 24th, 2010 | Author: demisskeribaby

Property Developers Paralimni Cyprus

Frankenstein & The Monster From Hell [VHS] Yet another great Cushing entry for Hammer – Patrick W. Crabtree – Lucasville, OH USA
This one was a little different from the prior Cushing Frankenstein entries in that the monster was a little updated and certainly a more sympathetic creature. But he could still tear up the dickens when he was displeased!

It takes place as a young Baron Frankenstein devotee, a competent and youthful-looking surgeon, is arrested by a buffoon of a constable for sorcery and is tossed into an insane asylum. And guess who’s really running the nuthouse? Baron Frankenstein (Cushing)!

The Baron rescues the young doctor from a certain life of Hell and allows him to become the facility physician, giving the Baron more time to experiment with his creature. This Frankenstein monster, by the way, gets the brain of a musical and mathematical genius… but, Alas! It becomes flawed because the Neanderthal body in which the Baron has inserted it begins to dominate and degrade these fine grey cells.

One little comment about Peter Cushing, he was looking really old in this one (which he was!), and I think it substantially benefitted his fine performance in this excellent Hammer Film entry.

As usual, the sets are great and the cinematography is just tops. I really enjoyed this fine horror film.
: Though it wasn’t Hammer Studios’ final film, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell can be considered its swan song, an intelligent, inventive, stylized reworking of the themes that had sustained the series for almost two decades. Dr. Frankenstein has buried his old identity and reigns over an insane asylum as Dr. Victor (Peter Cushing under a flamboyant blond wig in his sixth and final turn as the mad scientist) as if it were a live-parts yard for his continuing experiments. With the help of an ambitious acolyte he builds his latest creature, a hirsute apelike brute stitched together from the asylum’s most promising inhabitants and turned into a sad, tortured slave. The film was shot at the end of Hammer’s glory days, and the budgetary constraints can be seen in unconvincing miniatures and the rather bulky and stiff ogre suit, but the dark, claustrophobic sets create an effectively gloomy atmosphere. Director Terence Fisher effectively pulls out all stops for a marvelous sequence of the creature digging through the asylum graveyard in the middle of a flashing electrical storm, a demonic twist on the iconic gravedigging images that go all the way back to the 1931 Frankenstein. This was the last reunion for Cushing and Fisher, who together gave birth to Hammer’s gothic reign with The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula. Fisher retired after finishing the film. –Sean Axmaker
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Wendell Doig

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Frankenstein & The Monster From Hell [VHS]