Tonight's second night of Bugs Bunny shorts includes a trio of monster/mad scientist-inspired entries in the 1:00 AM half hour. That will be followed by a couple of horror features, including The Curse of Frankenstein at 3:00 AM. Fortunately, I had that one on my DVR from when John Carpenter selected it in last year's Two for One series, so I was able to watch it to do this review.
Frankenstein is, as always, not the monster (called the "Creature" in this movie), but Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the Creature. Here, Victor Frankenstein is played by Peter Cushing, and as the movie opens, he's in a Swiss prison awaiting execution. As you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback in which the main story is told, to a visiting priest.... (I suppose the other plot device could have involved Dr. Frankenstein escaping prison.)
Flash back to when Victor was an adolescent. His father has been dead for some time and now his mother dies, leaving Victor a fairly substantial estate in addition to the Baron title he's already had. His mom's sister shows up together with her daughter, ie. Victor's cousin Elizabeth (the adult Elizabeth being played by Hazel Court). Apparently Mom had given her sister a modest allowance, and she'd like that to continue, although this scene is more a way to introduce the Elizabeth character. Victor being on his own but still a legal minor, needs an adult, and hires a tutor in Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart).
Krempe proceeds to teach Victor everything he knows about the sciences, and Victor is an adept learner. Victor seems particularly interested in the relatively new field of electricity and what sort of energy animates life-forms. This first bit of experimentation culminates in bringing a dog back to life, which is a pretty neat trick. As you might guess from a Frankenstein movie, however, things aren't going to stop there, and Victor wants to go much farther than Krempe would like, leading Krempe to feel a sense of alarm. Worse, Victor builds his human for the experimentation by obtaining various body parts in highly illicit ways, up to and including murder of an aging professor.
Adult Elizabeth shows up with the intention of marrying her cousin, but Krempe wants her to leave the house right away because he believes she's in danger. Indeed, when Victor kills the professor for the professor's brain, Krempe gets in an argument with him that damages the brain. So when Victor's creature (played by Christopher Lee) comes to life, it's brain-damaged and sociopathic, with a propensity to kill.
The Curse of Frankenstein tells the story of Frankenstein's monster in a very different way from the 1931 Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi. This version focuses on Victor as an openly malevolent person, and that's a take which I think serves the story quite well. This was one of the earliest Hammer horror films, and was extremely successful, which led to all those future Hammer horror movies. Cushing is very good, while Lee doesn't exactly have a whole lot to do here since he doesn't show up in the first half of the movie and doesn't have any lines anyway. If you haven't seen The Curse of Frankenstein before, it's an excellent way to kick off the Hammer horror films.
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