cinema history class: frankenstein and the monster from hell (1974)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Directed by Terence Fisher

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
Imprisoned for conducting illegal experiments, a young surgeon discovers that Baron Frankenstein is secretly continuing his work inside the prison. He becomes Frankenstein’s assistant in an attempt to create a new man from the body parts of several inmates—with predictably disastrous results.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
I liked this one quite a bit more than I expected to. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell isn't really the kind of movie I generally go for, but it's a good movie, and visually it's terrific. Hammer certainly knew how to make a period horror movie look good.

Keith's friend Chris Gullo was our guest presenter for this one, and he was particularly well suited to the assignment: he literally wrote the book on Peter Cushing—or at least a book on Peter Cushing, the biography In All Sincerity... Peter Cushing. So we had an actual Cushing expert in the room.

Once again, though, I have questions about the Frankenstein pedigree. The monster doesn't look anything like the Frankenstein monster that exists in my head—the Boris Karloff/Herman Munster/Franken Berry version that has become the iconic image of Frankenstein. Ethan pointed out that this is hardly unprecedented: the monster in Edison's 1910 Frankenstein didn't look anything like Karloff either. Fair enough. Apparently Frankenstein monsters have always been free to do their own thing.

Peter Cushing is great as Baron Frankenstein. This was the final Hammer Frankenstein film and Cushing's sixth and last appearance as the Baron, which made having Chris present it especially appropriate. And Cushing's Frankenstein is quite the workaholic. Put the man in prison, give him access to a few corpses and some surgical equipment, and apparently he just can't resist getting a little work done.

The surgery scenes looked surprisingly good, too. The whole production has that wonderfully elaborate Hammer look, and even when what's happening is grotesque, it looks good being grotesque.

But my favorite bit may have been the asylum patients at the end. The extras playing them were having an absolute blast acting completely loony. That looked like a great day to be an extra: "What's my motivation?" "You're insane. Go nuts." I could have done that.

So, yes, much better than I expected. A good movie, great visuals, Peter Cushing doing what Peter Cushing does, and enough Frankenstein-adjacent mad science to keep things moving even if the monster isn't going to be mistaken for Franken Berry.

And apparently Joe has decided to abandon his longstanding commitment to giving everything a 10. For the second week in a row, he went with something in the nine-point-somethings.

I don't know what is happening anymore.

It hurts my brain.